


Some Good, To Someone in the World

by Alex51324



Series: Finding Home--the Dreaded Bonding AU [3]
Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sentinels and Guides Are Known, M/M, Peru, Sentinel/Guide Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-02
Updated: 2013-09-02
Packaged: 2017-12-25 09:10:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 39,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/951293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alex51324/pseuds/Alex51324
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Third part of the Dreaded Bonding AU/Finding Home trilogy.  Blair, Jim, Kas, and Angel have been sent to a remote Peruvian village; meanwhile, things are coming to a head in the outside world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Good, To Someone in the World

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Simplystars for beta! Title is, once again, from Robert Frost's "Death of the Hired Man." 
> 
> Warning: Harm to an animal OC at the beginning of the story.

After getting up at the crack of dawn and eating a quick breakfast, the four of them boarded a helicopter. Blair was surprised to see that their guards, ever-present since they’d left G-TAC, stayed behind. Jim and Kas were armed to the teeth—Angel would have been, too, except that he’d shoved all of his guns at Kas, saying, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with these,”—and could easily have overpowered the guy flying the chopper. 

They didn’t, though. The helicopter was extremely loud, vibrated constantly from the time it left the ground, and smelled vaguely of sweat, motor oil, and something that might have been rotten banana peels. Both Sentinels were obviously miserable—Jim less vocally so than Angel, but it was clear enough if you knew him—and Blair wasn’t too happy, either. It was way too noisy for conversation, which suited Blair just fine, since that meant he could focus all of his attention on trying not to puke.

After four or five interminable hours in the air, they landed. Blair knew they couldn’t possibly be in Peru yet, but at that point, he didn’t care where they were. When he climbed out of the helicopter, he felt like the ground was still moving. Clutching Jim’s arm to steady himself, he looked around. “Where are we?” It was clearly another military base, but he had no idea which one. 

“Fort Hood, I think,” Jim said. “Texas.”

“I thought we were going to Peru,” Angel said worriedly. “Did they lie?”

“He’s probably going to tell us,” Jim said, indicating a uniformed man who was approaching them. 

Sure enough, the new guy—Jim said he was a lieutenant—told them that they had an hour for lunch, and then they’d be boarding their transport to Peru.

“Oh, God, is it another helicopter?” Blair asked. 

The Lieutenant glanced at him. “I believe it’s a Piper Aztec.”

“Okay,” Blair said. “That doesn’t exactly answer my question.”

“It’s a small airplane,” Jim said.

“Oh, good.” Small planes were at least a little more comfortable for long trips than helicopters.

Once they found the cafeteria, Kas didn’t make more than the most halfhearted effort to get Angel to eat; for once, the rest of them had no more interest in food than he did. Blair got himself a Coke, hoping it would settle his stomach, but left it mostly untouched when Jim pointed out that the Piper Aztec wasn’t equipped with a bathroom. 

“You might want to take the bottle with you,” Kas suggested. “Just in case.”

Blair winced, but dumped out his Coke into a water fountain and tucked the empty bottle into his duffle. Better to have it and not want it than want it and not have it. 

All too soon, they were heading back to the airfield and boarding the small plane. It looked a little newer than the helicopter, and it didn’t smell particularly bad. Definitely an improvement.

Taking off in a small plane was a much more _visceral_ experience than in a large one, but once they were in the air, it was a smooth enough ride. After a while, Jim prodded him into filling the rest of them in on the part of Peru where they were going. Blair had to think hard to remember what he knew about it; he wished there had been an opportunity to do some research.

After talking about the region’s chief exports and natural resources for a while, Blair said, “So it’ll probably be either rain forest or a place where the forest was clear-cut for some kind of industrial purposes. If it’s rain forest, we might run into some of the indigenous population. I know some of the local language—enough to get by—I ought to teach you some common phrases.”

“I do speak Spanish,” Angel pointed out, dryly.

“Right,” Blair nodded, “but the indigenous tribes probably speak Quechua. They might know some Spanish if they have much contact with the more settled population, but if it’s that remote, they might not.”

“Quechua,” Kas said. “I’ve heard of that.”

“It’s the one that’s in crossword puzzles all the time. ‘Peruvian language,’” Angel said. “You know how they like words with Q’s in them.”

Blair started them off with how to say, “Hello,” and “I’m sorry for my mistake,” and then moved on to “This is my Sentinel.

“ _Enqueri_ ,” Jim said, repeating him. “That’s what the locals called me when I was stationed in Peru.”

“Well, that’s why,” Blair said. “It just means, ‘Sentinel.’ Now, you’re going to be tricky,” he said to Angel, “Because their word for ‘doctor’ is the same as their word for ‘shaman,’ which also means ‘Guide.’ They’re not going to know what to make of you.”

“So, a lot like home, then,” Angel said. 

“Are their shamans always Guides?” Jim asked suddenly.

Blair blinked. “As far as I know,” he said cautiously. “That’s the usual way it works.”

“When I was down there before, I got to know the holy man of this tribe that was nearby,” Jim explained. “I didn’t know he was a Guide—that must have been why he took an interest in me.”

“Probably,” Blair agreed. “I mean, he probably was. There could be exceptions, but they wouldn’t use the same word for both if they usually had to distinguish between the two roles. Where was your Guide?”

Jim went still for a moment, then said, “Dead. Our chopper crashed, and we lost some men.”

“What about the tribe’s Sentinel?” Blair asked, wondering if he could learn anything about how a tribal Sentinel would relate to another Sentinel turning up unexpectedly in his territory. It was something he had been wondering about not long ago, and if there was a tribe nearby, it might become a pressing concern.

“Also dead,” Jim said. “Shortly before we got there. There was a drug cartel operating in the area…I don’t know many details.”

Blair didn’t press for them. “Huh. Well, not that it’s going to be an issue with any of us, but treating a Guide the way the U.S.—or most of the developed world—would consider normal would be deeply offensive to anybody from a tribal culture.” 

“Well, good,” Angel said. “It is offensive.”

“Particularly offensive, I mean,” Blair explained. “Like…spitting on a nun.” Playing the odds, Angel almost had to have been raised Catholic. 

Angel almost giggled, glancing slyly over at Kas, who said, “Don’t even think about it.”

“I think I’d have preferred you to any of the ones that taught at my elementary school,” Angel said. “Actually, I know I would have.”

“I would have been very strict,” Kas said. 

“Yeah, right.” Angel tucked himself up closer to Kas’s side. Blair had to agree with him, there—Kas was about as strict as a stick of soft butter, at least where Angel was concerned. 

“Anyway,” Jim said, “the point is, Guides are very important people in tribal cultures. Right, Chief?”

“Yeah,” Blair agreed. Jim really had been paying attention, all those times he let Blair run his mouth off about his research.

“This guy I knew when I was in Peru before—Incacha was his name—he was the one the chief of the tribe talked to if he needed advice on anything.”

“So, what, the Guides are in charge of the Sentinels?” Angel asked. He didn’t seem particularly disturbed by the prospect.

Jim glanced at Blair, tossing the question back at him. “Not exactly,” Blair said. “They’re both very important. Just different…specialties. The Sentinels are warriors and hunters, the Guides are more involved with the spiritual side of things.”

“Oh,” Angel said. “Like Robert and Jean-Vincent. Our friends from France,” he added at Jim’s questioning look.

“Oh, right,” Jim said. “The ambassadors.” 

“That’s really interesting, that they’re ambassadors,” Blair added, “because in a traditional context, relations with other tribes would definitely be in the Guide’s job description. Sentinels are a little too territorial to make good diplomats.”

Kas nodded. “Jean-Vincent is actually the senior Ambassador; Robert just has to take the lead here in the U.S. because of—well, you know. He says at their other postings Robert was basically a glorified bodyguard.”

“I didn’t know that,” Angel said.

Kas shrugged. “Guide stuff.”

After several more hours in the air, they landed at a small airstrip that had been carved out of a valley between two mountains. The plane jolted down the rutted dirt track before finally coming to a stop near a corrugated metal building. Before they could get out of their seats, a jeep came bumping along the runway toward them. 

Blair was mildly amused, but not surprised, that Jim held the rest of them back. “I’ll go first.”

But it was their pilot who actually got out of the plane first, and greeted the driver of the jeep. They exchanged salutes, the pilot saying, “They were quiet, Rand—no problems.” 

Jim still insisted on being next out of the plane. The jeep driver saluted him, much more crisply than he had the pilot, and said, “Corporal Lenox, sir, reporting to escort you to the base.”

Jim returned the salute. The other two saluted as well, Angel after Kas kicked him in the ankle. Blair waved sheepishly. He’d asked Jim if he ought to join in the saluting thing when everyone else was doing it, but Jim had said absolutely not; civilians didn’t salute. 

“Major Ellison, Captain Temas,” Lenox greeted them. The “Captain Temas” was clearly directed to Kas. Angel smirked, but the two of them clearly meant to let his misunderstanding ride for a while. Suited Blair—it would probably be the most entertainment they got for a while.

Jim directed the Corporal to get their bags, doing his best impression of a surly bastard. Blair wasn’t sure that was smart—he could see why Jim wanted to establish himself as the commanding officer, since the exchange between Lenox and the pilot suggested that Lenox knew he was acting as jailor as well as subordinate. But if he was remembering Jim’s lesson on Army ranks correctly, Lenox was also the next man down from the four of them, and he was familiar with the territory and the assignment. He’d make a better friend than an enemy. 

#

“Well, this is cozy,” Jim said, dropping his duffle bag on the double bed. This small room, which contained the bed, a rod for hanging clothes, and a small dresser, and had no room for anything else, constituted the commanding officer’s quarters. It was a slightly better option than the barracks, where the three privates shared a room and the corporal had his own cubbyhole. Angel and Kas had their quarters in the medical building, probably not much better.

“I’ve had worse,” Blair said, looking around. 

Jim winced, thinking of the room where he’d first found Blair, chained to the wall and bleeding.

Blair said, “Oh. I meant, on digs and stuff. Tents, you know. No indoor plumbing. Sand in your—hair. And other places.” Turning quickly, he started opening the dresser drawers. “Are there any—yeah, here.” He dug out an armful of yellowed netting. 

Mosquito net, right. Blair clambered up onto the bed and hung it, Jim helping to arrange it so that the whole bed was enclosed. 

“We could have someone rustle up a cot, if you don’t want to share,” Jim said, looking at the one bed.

“And put it where?” Blair asked. “I’m okay if you are.” 

Jim nodded. He was too tired to go hunting for furniture, or even order anyone else to do it, after the long day of traveling. When they arrived, the corporal had shown them around the base, what there was of it, and he’d briefly glanced over the men under his command. Corporal Lenox had showed him the duty roster—he had two men on guard duty at night, and one on each shift during the day, which was the best he could do with the men available. Jim had told him to carry on; tomorrow would be soon enough to revise the duty schedule to include them. 

Meeting the Cyclops Oil personnel was another thing that he had decided could wait until tomorrow. Lenox explained that the Army personnel usually ate in the oil company’s cafeteria, which had closed for the night. There were a couple of crates of MREs in a storage closet, though, so Jim had grabbed a few of those and passed ‘em out, and the Sentinel-Guide teams had retired to their respective quarters. 

Jim had been strangely torn between being glad to finally no longer be sharing close quarters with the other pair and feeling strangely anxious about letting them out of his sight. Finally he’d said, “Come get us if you have any problems.”

Angel had given him a strange look, but Kas just nodded agreement and dragged Angel off toward the low cinderblock building that was his and Angel’s new domain.

He was definitely glad not to be hearing what Angel thought about where they’d be living for the indefinite future. 

“Is there someplace around here to take a shower?” Blair asked. “I stink.”

He really did. “There almost has to be,” Jim said. 

There were no doors in their room apart from the one that led back out into what would be Jim’s office, so they went back out there and, after a brief detour into a supply closet, found the bathroom. It was tiny and smelled of mildew and rust. Jim generously offered Blair the first shower—at least that way, when it was his turn, the place would smell like Blair and Blair’s shower products instead—and retreated to the bedroom to fix the MREs.

Jim hardly ever bothered using the little chemical heaters that came with MRE’s. In his experience, if he was eating MREs, it was usually at the end of a long day of either training or working, and all he wanted to do was get some nutrition into his body as quickly as possible so he could get some sleep before starting the whole grind over again. But there was no denying that lukewarm freeze-dried food tasted ever-so-slightly better than room-temperature freeze-dried food, and he figured Blair would be in the shower for a while, so he might as well heat them up.

It turned out, though, that Blair wasn’t long at all. Shortly after Jim heard the water turn on, he also heard Blair say, “Oh, shit…great, that’s just what I needed,” and other assorted grumbling. A few minutes later, a towel-wrapped Blair came back into the office. “Did you know there’s no hot water?” he asked accusingly.

“I kind of thought there might not be. We’re lucky to have running water at all.”

“Considering those guys over there are raping the Earth for fossil fuels, you’d think the least they could do is use some of it to run a hot water heater.” He sniffed and looked at the desk, where Jim was fixing the MREs. “What smells like dog food?”

“Dinner. Go put some clothes on.”

“What is it?” Blair asked, ignoring him and coming over to the desk to poke at the MRE pouches.

“One’s--” Jim glanced at the bags. “Beef stew, and the other one’s teriyaki beef.”

“How do you tell the difference?”

“The teriyaki one has rice in it. The other stuff—in the little packets—is usually better than the entrées.” He left Blair examining their dining options and went to take his own shower.

When he got back, Blair—now dressed in boxers and a t-shirt—was sitting in the desk chair eating one of the meals out of the little cardboard tray. “You know, this isn’t too bad if you don’t look at it. I’ve definitely eaten worse. There was this one time, we were staying at a commune outside Taos….”

Jim took a seat on the desk and half-listened as Blair rambled on about a wild-rice and butternut squash soup one of his mother’s fellow hippies had cooked.

“…and we had to eat it, because she was on kitchen duty all week, and she wouldn’t make anything else until it was gone…I think she spent the whole grocery budget on peyote or something. Or paint. I forget. This other kid who was living there and I, we tried to put it out for the coyotes to eat, but even they wouldn’t touch that stuff.” He shook his head. “I mean, it _should_ have been good. Wild rice is good. Butternut squash is good. But this stuff was just revolting. This other time, in college, I made this pot of chili that was supposed to last me until my financial aid came in….”

Still talking, Blair pitched his MRE tray into the trash can and started picking through the packets of snacks and side dishes. Jim finished his own meal and picked out a packet of salted peanuts. Not much that could go wrong with peanuts. 

“…crusted to the bottom, I think it would have been all right if I hadn’t stirred it up, you know, so I could just eat the part that _wasn’t_ burned, but I did—man, that stuff was terrible. I tagged along to the dining hall with people and ate on their meal cards as often as I could, but I still had to eat a lot of it…”

Blair was babbling, but that was all right, Jim decided. He babbled when he was nervous, but when he was terrified he either went quiet or got angry. Nervous was okay. They could handle nervous. 

“…so anyway, compared to that, I can deal with these.”

Still half-listening to Blair, Jim extended his senses out, familiarizing himself with the normal nighttime sounds of their temporary—he hoped—new home. There was a generator chugging away not far from their building, and another, larger one over on the oil company’s side of the compound. Footsteps on leaf-litter and gravel, the night shift guards walking their rounds. Birds and insects calling from the trees that surrounded the compound. Men’s voices, inside the nearby barracks. He focused on those for a moment, but there was nothing there he had to attend to, just the usual barracks talk about women and weekend passes. Kas, saying, “At least try some of the pound cake, Ang—you always liked that.”

He drew himself back in, focusing on his Guide’s heartbeat. “—do now?” 

“Huh?” Jim said stupidly. Blair must have said something that required a real answer, not the absent, “Uh-hms” that Jim had been murmuring every time he paused.

“I said, now that we’re here, what do we do now?”

“Guard the base,” Jim said, wondering if Blair thought they ought to try to escape. “We—the Sentinels, I mean—should probably take the night watch. We can alternate, us one night, Kas and Angel the next.”

“Angel’s going to love that,” Blair noted, but didn’t complain.

“He doesn’t have to like it,” Jim said. He’d have Kas with him; he’d be all right. Jim would explain to them that if anything did happen, Angel’s job was to wake first him, the then rest of the soldiers. If the four of them handled nights, the four enlisted men could divide up days between them. He and Angel could use the days they didn’t have guard duty to do the administrative and medical side of their jobs. 

So that was the duty roster sorted out. One less thing to worry about tomorrow. “Once we get settled, we should do some recon, try to figure out if there really is a drug cartel active in the area.” The higher-ups could be lying flat out about that, or exaggerating. It would make a difference, in terms of how careful they had to be. “That’ll probably be us, or maybe me and Kas, if we can get Angel to agree to split up that way.” Personally, Jim would rather face the drug lords than babysit Angel, but that job would play right into Blair’s wheelhouse. 

“So what am I supposed to do, besides follow you around on guard duty every other night?” Blair asked. 

Jim shrugged. “Keep working on your article. Study the habits of north American oil workers in their natural habitat. I don’t know. I’ll try to find you some duties if you need something to do, Chief, but I don’t think any of us are going to be very busy.”

#

Jim woke already sticky with sweat where Sandburg had been pressed against his side. Sharing the small bed would be perfect if they were in the arctic, or even in the chill of a desert night, but in the hot, humid rain forest, the sleeping arrangements definitely needed work. Maybe they could get some bunks brought in. Or hammocks. Blair seemed like the hammock type. 

Rolling away from his hairy hot-water bottle, Jim got up and opened the window, hoping to let in some hint of a cooling breeze. There wasn’t one, but the open window made the sound of chattering monkeys outside loud enough to wake Blair. The Guide untangled himself from the sweaty sheets and came to stand beside Jim. “’time is it?” he asked with a yawn.

“Oh-five-hundred,” Jim said. Suddenly, the monkeys’ chatter was stopped by the crack of a gunshot, followed by a human shout of, “Got the little bastard!”

Blair, a little faster on the uptake than Jim, was out the door and running across the compound, barefoot and in his underwear, leaving Jim no choice but to follow him.

As they got closer to the compound’s chain-link fence, Jim smelled gunpowder and hot blood. The blood didn’t smell quite human, but it was close enough to be disturbing. He heard Blair demand, “What the _hell_ do you think you’re doing?” just before he came into sight of the soldier on morning guard duty. 

Luckily for him, at least, the soldier noticed his brand-new commanding officer before he had a chance to reply. Ignoring the indignant, half-naked man, Private Solorio straightened up, saluted, and said, “Major Ellison, Sir!”

“Jim, look,” Blair said, pointing at the top of the fence. A small animal, badly injured and bleeding, hung on the wire. “Give me a boost up there—it looks like he’s still alive. Maybe Angel can fix him.” Blair grabbed hold of the fence and stuck one foot in the chain link, as if considering how to climb up it.

“Is that thing rabid?” Jim asked Solorio, thinking there was at least a chance the soldier had a good reason for shooting it.

“Sir?”

“Do you have any reason to believe that the animal is rabid or otherwise a danger to this base?”

“Uh…no, sir.”

“Go get Captain Temas and Lieutenant Temas from their quarters.” It looked like the animal was gut-shot; Jim highly doubted it would survive, even if Angel had happened to be an expert on Peruvian squirrel-things instead of a human doctor, but sending for him would be easier than trying to convince Blair of that. “Dismissed.”

As the soldier ran off toward the medical building, Jim stripped off his t-shirt, handing it to Blair. “Don’t touch that thing with your bare hands. It could still be sick.” He boosted Blair up onto his shoulders and they got the squirrel-thing down.

Getting Blair _off_ his shoulders with both hands full of squirrel-thing proved tricky. Blair had to hand the thing down to him and then scramble off. 

The little animal’s heart was still beating, but there was a rattle in its breathing that Jim didn’t like the sound of. “Chief, I don’t think this guy’s going to make it.” 

“Let’s go see what Angel says.” Blair started off toward the medical building, leaving Jim once again following in his wake.

#

Kas woke to a sharp rap on the door and Angel clutching him worriedly, saying, “Kas, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Let go of me, and I’ll check,” he suggested, prying Angel’s fingers off of his arm. He got out of bed and gathered up some pants on his way to the door, putting them on before he opened the door.

One of the three privates was standing there; Kas hadn’t learned their names yet. “Sir, Major Ellison requests to see you and Lieutenant Temas,” the man said.

Kas was confused for a moment before he remembered that they hadn’t cleared up yet which of them was Captain Temas. “When?”

“I believe immediately, sir.”

Kas blinked. “Is somebody hurt?”

“Not to my knowledge, sir.”

“Okay. We’re, uh, give me a minute to get Angel up.” Kas shut the door.

Angel checked his watch and complained, “What is Jim getting us up in the middle of the night for?”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s important.”

“He better not be making us go running or something,” Angel said. 

“I really doubt it.” Kas didn’t think Jim would let being Angel’s commanding officer go to his head. If he did, Kas was going to have to have a serious talk with him. 

They threw on some fatigues and went out. “Can you hear where Jim is?” Kas asked, realizing he had forgotten to ask the private where they were supposed to meet Jim. 

“Right there,” Angel said, pointing over to the left. Then he said, “Oh, shit,” and broke into a jog.

Following, Kas quickly saw why—Jim had a bloody t-shirt wrapped around his hand. Why had that idiot of a PFC said no one was hurt? 

By the time Kas caught up, though, Angel had the t-shirt in his own hands and was examining it. Jim looked fine. 

“Oh, fuck, Blair, this looks really bad,” Angel was saying. “I haven’t checked over the clinic yet, but I bet we don’t even have tools small enough. Let’s get him inside, though, and see what we can do.” Angel started back to the clinic. 

Following, Kas asked the other two, “What’s going on?”

“Turns out Solorio was livening up his guard duty with some target practice. He shot some kind of—squirrel thing,” Jim explained. 

Blair said, “I think it’s a marmoset. Asshole,” he added, clearly meaning Solorio. 

Understanding now, Kas hurried to catch up with Angel. Once they were inside the clinic, he left Angel holding their small patient while he searched the cupboards for anything that might be of use. 

“Get some saline, and the smallest needle we have,” Angel told him. 

“Here’s the saline. These are the only needles in with the IV stuff; let me see if there’s anything else in the closet.” 

There wasn’t. Kas returned from the supply cupboard to find Angel bent over an exam table that held the marmoset, trying to find a place to insert the IV. “This won’t work, Kas, this fucking needle’s bigger around than his vein.”

“There isn’t anything else,” Kas said, adjusting the light over the exam table so they had a decent view of the patient. “How bad off is he?”

“Awful. It’s a little hard to tell, but it looks like the bullet went through his large intestine—or maybe that’s the small intestine—and then up through the diaphragm to the lung. Even if we could find a way to intubate him and re-inflate the lung, it’s going to be septic as hell. And he’s going into shock.” 

“How long do you think he has?”

“A few minutes, maybe.”

Not long enough to do anything, and too long not to do anything. Kas picked up the little animal and snapped its neck. 

Angel looked down sadly at the small corpse. “I think we should bury it,” he said after a moment. 

“Yeah,” Kas said. “Come on, Blair will probably want to help.” 

They went back outside and explained what had happened to Jim and Blair. As Blair and Angel started to discuss funeral arrangements, Kas saw the man who had woken them that morning approach. Jim, moving so that his body was between the PFC and Blair, signaled for him to approach. 

“Private,” he said. “You already indicated that you had no reason to believe the animal was diseased, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” the man—Solorio, Kas guessed—said.

“Did you have any reason to believe that the animal was a threat to the security of this base?”

“No, sir.”

“Is this base experiencing a critical food shortage?”

“No, sir,” the private repeated, now sounding thoroughly confused. 

“Do you know which of the indigenous animals in this area represent endangered species?”

“They’re all over the place out there,” the man protested, adding belatedly, “sir.”

“Are you able to identify the animal by species?” Jim pressed on. 

“No, sir.”

“So you don’t know whether or not the animal is an endangered species.”

“Uh…I guess not, sir.”

“So you shot an animal that was no threat to human health or safety, was not needed for emergency food supplies, and that for all you know could be an endangered species. Is that an accurate summation of the circumstances, Private Solorio?”

Solorio at least had the brains not to argue with an enraged Sentinel, superior officer, in his underpants. “Sir, yes, sir!”

“You’re on guard duty until oh-six-thirty, is that correct, soldier?”

“Yes, sir!”

“When you are relieved, you will report to Lieutenant Temas for instructions as to where you will dig a six-by-six-by-six foot grave for the animal. When you are finished, if Lieutenant Temas has no further use for you, you will be confined to quarters pending disciplinary review. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Dismissed!”

The private saluted sharply, even though Ellison was very much out of uniform, and returned to the perimeter. 

“That ought to shake things up around here,” Kas observed, once the private was out of earshot. 

Jim nodded. “Not exactly how I planned to start my command here. Chief, are you all right?”

Blair nodded. He seemed pissed off rather than distraught, which was a relief. “Who does he think he is, shooting animals for no reason?”

“He’s a dumb kid who’s stuck in the middle of nowhere with no girls, no video games, and no TV,” Kas said. “I think spending a day digging in this heat will demonstrate that if he’s bored enough to take potshots at the local wildlife, the rest of us will be glad to find something productive for him to do.” Kas wondered how long the four enlisted men had been assigned here. Keeping them from making trouble out of boredom might be the biggest challenge this command had to offer. 

Blair nodded, seeming to absorb Kas’s explanation. “I guess. That was a good idea, Jim, making him dig the grave.”

Jim didn’t point out, and Kas didn’t either, that being made to dig a six-foot grave for the butt was a standard punishment for soldiers caught smoking in unauthorized areas. Blair would probably find the parallel disrespectful to their animal friends.

Blair continued, “Maybe while we’re here we can teach those guys to appreciate the indigenous culture and natural beauty of this place, you think? The rain forest is a really fascinating ecosystem.”

“Sure thing, Chief. What do you say we put some clothes on first, though?”

“Oh, yeah….” Blair let himself be led away by Jim, and Kas took his place on the medical clinic stoop next to Angel.

Taking the marmoset’s body out of Angel’s hands, Kas said, “Feel like going back to bed?”

“No, I’m up. Fuck. What a way to start the day.”

“You all right?”

Angel nodded. “I’m kind of sad about the monkey, but it’s not like I knew her personally. Do you think that guy’s going to make trouble for us?” he asked, gesturing off in the direction Solorio had gone.

Kas thought. “I don’t know. Probably not—these kinds of isolated postings, people get into bad habits, sloppy discipline. I don’t think Jim was unreasonably hard on him.” Indicating the monkey, he added, “Let’s see if we can find room for her in the refrigerator until the grave’s ready. If I’m going to be supervising a punishment detail in a half an hour, I want a shower and breakfast first.”

“Oh, yeah,” Angel said, getting up. “You had better keep an eye on that fucking kid—heatstroke, you know. It’s not too bad now, but in a couple of hours it’ll be a scorcher.”

#

Once they were cleaned up and dressed, Blair and Jim headed over toward the Cyclops side of the compound to find the cafeteria they’d been told about the night before. The oil company’s area was bigger than theirs, with newer buildings and more personnel. Blair estimated about two dozen men eating in the cafeteria, plus the three or four local women who were staffing the serving line.

Breakfast was a selection of scrambled eggs, sausage, toast, and cereals. Blair wondered if the cooks ever served the local food for the other meals. Before he could ask, though, Kas and Angel showed up. Angel asked for _café con leche_ , and when the woman offered him a cup of weak American coffee instead, began explaining in Spanish how to make it. Blair shrugged and took his toast and eggs off to the table Jim was heading for. He could ask later.

Apart from their group, there was only one other Army guy in the cafeteria, sitting a table a little apart from the oil company men. He was just leaving, so Jim and Blair took over his table. Kas and Angel joined them a moment later, Kas with a loaded breakfast tray and Angel with two slices of toast.

As they started eating, Blair tried to listen to the conversations going on around him, wondering what the oil company guys made of their arrival, but on the few occasions that he could sort out one voice from the general hum, the words he caught were about drilling, mapping, and other shop talk. 

After a few minutes, one of the cooks came over to their table and gave Angel a steaming mug of milky coffee and a plate of sliced papaya. “Gracias, Senora,” he told her, and introduced the rest of them. They learned that her name was Rosa, and she and the other women walked five miles from the local village every day to work in the oil company cafeteria. Since it was nearly dark by the time the cafeteria closed for the night, the oil men drove them back in a jeep. Some of the local young men worked for the oil company too, clearing the ground with machetes so that the oil men could get their machines where they needed to go. 

When she and Angel paused, Blair asked if the villagers minded that the oil company was cutting down their rain forest. The woman said no, the jobs they brought paid well, and the oil company foreman didn’t tolerate his men disrespecting the women. It was a good place to work. 

“Ask her about the drug cartels,” Jim said, nudging him.

Blair asked.

“Drug lords? No, there is no coca here. The only trouble comes from the natives.”

“Natives? Where are they? Do you know what tribe they are?”

“No. They are around here, somewhere. They don’t live in houses, they aren’t Christians.” 

After a few more pleasantries, the woman went back to work. Blair reported back what he’d learned to the non-Spanish-speakers. 

“Do you think she’s right, about there not being any drug cartel?” Jim asked.

“She’s lived here all her life,” Blair pointed out. “You’d think she’d know.”

“They could be operating in secret,” Jim answered. 

Blair thought it was more likely that the drug cartel had been invented to provide a flimsy excuse for sending them here, but he decided not to press Jim on the point. 

“So what’s on the agenda for today?” Kas asked once Angel was settled down and eating. “Besides getting Solorio straightened out?”

“Not much, during the day,” Jim said. “I’ll need to meet with the man in charge of the Cyclops section, and then spend some more time with the men, making my expectations clear. I don’t think you need to come along for that.”

“I checked over the medical files last night,” Angel added. “There are only two open cases, one of the oil workers who’ll be coming in for a wound check and to have stitches taken out the day after tomorrow, and Corporal Lennox has allergies and will come in when he needs more medication. I want to inventory the supplies and equipment today—from what I saw, I think there are some things I’ll need to restock.”

Jim nodded. “I have to look around in my office, too. I’ll give you some requisition forms as soon as I find them.” He cleared his throat. “So, your medical duties aren’t going to take up much of your time?”

Angel shook his head. “Hardly. They had a nurse here before me, and he didn’t have much to do, either. I’m thinking Kas could have handled all four of our jobs single-handed.”

“That’s what I thought,” Jim agreed. “With four of us and only four enlisted, I think we’re going to have to take our turns doing guard duty.”

Angel paused in his contented munching of coffee-dipped toast. “Huh?”

Blair said quickly, “I guess it wouldn’t be fair, for us to just sit around on our asses all the time while everybody else has work to do.” He figured an appeal to fairness would work better on Angel than emphasizing Jim’s authority as commanding officer.

“Yeah,” Kas said. “In a top-heavy rank structure like this, it’ll be better for morale and discipline if the men can see that we’re pulling our own weight.”

Angel sighed. “I guess so. But I get to have Kas with me.”

“Of course,” Jim said. “I was thinking, you and Kas and me and Blair would trade off the night shifts. The other guys can do days. How does that sound?”

“Okay, I guess. It makes sense, we’ll be able to hear if there’s anything happening at night.” He took another bite of now-soggy toast. “Do I have to carry a gun?”

“Rifle,” Kas said. “And I for one would rather you didn’t.”

“It’s not exactly regulation, but having seen you on the range, I think the base would be safer if you were unarmed,” Jim agreed. “I’ll never know how a Sentinel can be as terrible a shot as you are.”

“It’s because he closes his eyes,” Kas explained. 

“I’d be better at it if it didn’t make such a loud noise.”

Kas checked his watch as they finished up breakfast. “I’d better go get ready to meet Solorio. Do you know where we can find a plan of the base? I guess I need to look for a spot he can dig without hitting the septic tank or anything.”

Jim nodded. “There has to be one in my office somewhere.”

“You all right going back to our place on your own?” Kas asked Angel.

“I think I can manage.” Blair would have been rolling his eyes at Jim’s over-protectiveness if he’d said that, but Angel seemed serious. 

They left the cafeteria and made their way back to the army side of the compound, parting ways with Angel as they neared the medical building. “Is he doing all right?” Jim asked Kas once they were all inside Jim’s office.

“Ang? Yeah, he’s okay. He took the guard duty thing really well; the way you put it to him helped. You too, Blair. And he has a clinic to work in now; that should help. If we can just get him some patients, he should be fairly happy.” 

“I don’t know what we can do to arrange that,” Jim pointed out. 

“There might be some sick people over at the village,” Kas suggested. 

“Our supply requisitions are going to look pretty strange if we try to provide medical care to the village out of an eight-man base,” Jim said.

“Yeah, but what can the army do about it, kidnap us and send us to Peru?” Blair asked rhetorically. “We might as well try to do somebody some good while we’re stuck down here. Anyway, I bet we can obfuscate on the requisition forms. Uh, the clinic roof developed a leak since the nurse left. Right over where you keep the antibiotics and bandages. You need new everything.”

Kas and Jim exchanged an amused glance. “Chief, do you have a hidden past as a Supply sergeant?” Jim asked.

They started looking for a plan of the base, eventually finding one filed under “infrastructure.” It hadn’t been updated since the oil company came, but Kas said that if they stuck to their own side of the compound, it should work for what they had to do. 

He and Blair were studying the map, trying to choose a good spot, when Solorio came into the office. “Private Solorio, reporting as ordered, sir!”

Jim somehow managed to make returning his salute look more like he was flipping him off. Blair was impressed. Kas glanced up at him. “Just a minute, Private. What do you think, here?” he asked, pointing at a spot on the map they had already rejected.

Blair played along, and after a few minutes Kas collected Solorio and went off with him to find a shovel. 

They puttered around the office for a while, getting their stuff unpacked and figuring out where everything was. There was a telephone on Jim’s desk, but Blair’s hopes of getting in contact with the outside world were dashed when it turned out it was only able to call other phones in the compound. Jim used it to call the Cyclops plant manager and set up an appointment for that afternoon. 

#

“The brass must be expecting things to heat up around here, if they sent two Sentinels,” Solorio said, as Kas paced out the area where the man would be digging.

Kas gave him a flat look. They hadn’t sorted out yet what they’d be telling the enlisted personnel about their reasons for being here. The truth was definitely out; even if they hadn’t been ordered not to, Kas didn’t think it would be smart to tell a man they had no reason to think of as a friend that they’d been sent here on a punishment detail of their own, to do work that was every bit as pointless as what Solorio would be spending his morning doing. Finally he settled on, “It’s classified,” which was true, anyway.

Solorio nodded as if he understood. “Yes, sir. Say, are you really a Ranger, sir?” he asked as he started digging.

“They don’t let you wear the patch if you aren’t,” Kas said. Back at Fort McCloud, they had eventually issued him his Ranger tabs after Jim and Angel made a fuss about it.

“Is Ranger training as hard as they say?”

“Yes, it is.” 

“I’ve been thinking about applying. I’ve been in the army three years, and I haven’t seen any real action yet. The Army wouldn’t be able to stick me in a dump like this if I was a Ranger, I bet. Uh, no offense, sir.”

“None taken,” Kas told him. The place was a dump. Solorio being stupid enough to wish he was in combat instead was a little bit offensive, but it was no skin off his back. At least Solorio seemed to be taking his punishment detail in good spirits—he seemed like the type who would find a harsh physical punishment something to brag about later. Maybe they ought to have made him dig the grave with a spoon; that would thrill him.

“Which one of the Guides is yours? Not that it looks like there’s much to choose from between the two of the little faggots. You’d think they could do a little better for a Ranger.”

Kas stiffened. It had been a long time since he and Angel had had to deal with attitudes like that. Somehow, it hadn’t gotten any easier.

After a moment, Solorio felt Kas’s gaze on him and stopped digging. “Sir?”

“I’m Captain Temas’s Guide,” Kas told him. 

Solorio stared at him like he thought Kas must be having a joke on him. “But….”

“Just a tip,” Kas said, “insulting his Guide is really not a good way to make a favorable impression on a Sentinel.” Not entirely true—there were plenty of Sentinels who would like it just fine—but definitely true in these circumstances. “One of us will be back to check on you later.”

#

Walking into the plant manager’s office was like walking into another world. The building was poured concrete with a flat tar roof, like everything else on the oil company’s side of the compound, but the office itself was carpeted, air conditioned like a meat locker, and decorated with tasteful prints and exotic hardwood furniture, including a desk that was practically bigger than the bed in their quarters. On the desk was a computer and multi-line phone. This guy was definitely in contact with the outside world.

“Ed Rigel,” he said, extending a hand for Jim to shake. “Nice to meet you. Can I offer you a coffee or anything? No? That’ll be all, Flora.” The local woman who had showed them in returned to her desk in the outer office, which was much more congruent with the décor of the rest of the compound. “I’m in charge of our operation here, but I divide my time between this site and our regional offices in Lima. Frank, who showed you around before, is in charge when I’m away.” Before being escorted to Rigel’s office, they’d had a brief, uninformative tour of the compound. 

“Thank you,” Jim said. 

“I have to admit, I’m a little concerned about why the Army sent us a Sentinel. Is there something going on I should know about?”

Jim hesitated fractionally, then said, “Just what I was going to ask you. What’s the security situation like?”

They talked about that for a while, Rigel taking out contour maps of the area and pointing out the areas where they were drilling. “There’s some kind of hunter-gatherer tribe in the area; every once in a while they show up and start waving spears around, vandalizing our drill sites, things like that.”

Blair opened his mouth to ask if anyone had thought of talking to the tribe about the problem, but Jim stepped gently on his foot, and Blair shut up, reminded that they had agreed Jim would take the lead during this meeting.

“You have all the appropriate permissions from the Peruvian government to drill here, of course,” Jim said.

“Of course. We took over the Army’s hundred-year lease on this property, which includes mineral rights. The tribesmen were appropriately compensated by the government at the time of the original agreement, but some of these remote tribes, you know, they don’t have the concept of ownership. They think we ought to be asking their permission again, even though they already gave it.” 

“What about the local villagers? Any tensions there?” 

“No—the villagers love us. Jobs, you know—we use local personnel whenever possible. They start out as porters or general labor and have the chance to learn a trade and move up. Not just the men, either. Flora, out there, Cyclops sent her to secretarial school in Lima. We’ve brought a lot of money and a lot of infrastructure to the region.” 

“That’s nice,” Jim said. “You probably get a lot of mileage out of that in your annual shareholders’ report.”

“Exactly,” the man agreed.

“Any drug activity in the area?” Jim asked next. 

Rigel shook his head. “Not in the last decade or so. I believe there was a drug lord active in the area back before you guys built this base, but that was in the early 80’s. They’ve moved on.”

Interesting. If the drug cartel was a cover story, Rigel hadn’t been brought in on it. 

“I’d like to take some copies of these plans with me,” Jim said, tapping the maps. “We might want to do some patrols, make sure you guys haven’t stumbled too close to anything out there.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Rigel said smoothly. “The disruptions have been very minor.”

“Even so,” Jim said, just as smoothly. “Call them training exercises, if you like. I need to keep my men sharp.”

After a few more protests, which Jim dismissed easily, Rigel said, “I’m heading out to Lima first thing tomorrow morning—glad I got a chance to meet you before I left. I should be back end of the week—why don’t you and the other fellow—Captain Temas, is it?—come over for some steaks. I have a private dining room here. On Friday, say?”

Blair expected Jim to say no—Jim would, he thought, have something to say about a commander who ate better than his men—but Jim just said, “We’d be glad to, and I think I can accept on behalf of Captain and Lieutenant Temas as well.”

“Lieu—oh, your Guides. Do you…”

“Of course,” Jim said. “We come as a set, Sentinels and Guides.” 

They left, the roll of maps tucked under Blair’s arm. 

Once they were back on the Army side of the compound, Jim said, “Let’s find Kas and Angel; I want to get their take on this.”

They didn’t have much trouble tracking down Angel, at least, in the medical building. As soon as they were inside, Blair was struck by a smell of cooking meat; for a brief, horrified second, he thought someone must have been badly burned. Then he noticed that he also smelled tomatoes and spices, and saw that Angel was stirring something in a big pot. “Hi,” Angel said cheerily. “Rosa—from the cafeteria?—she gave us some supplies. I’m making _ropa vieja_.” Glancing at Jim, he added, “Sort of Cuban pot roast. It’s good.”

“Cool,” Blair said. “Is it beef, or pork?”

“Pork. And plantains, if I can cook them in the autoclave without burning them.”

“You can do that?” It looked like Angel was cooking the meat on a regular hot plate; Blair wondered if it and the stock pot were actually medical equipment of some kind. 

Angel shrugged. “Guess we’ll find out. We cooked a Thanksgiving turkey in one when I was in med school. It should work.”

“You could make a fire and roast them in the coals,” Blair suggested.

“That’s what Kas said. In this heat? If this doesn’t work, we’ll try that next time. I’m still stuck on how to cook rice, though. You can’t autoclave rice; it burns too fast.”

“Ask him how he knows,” Kas suggested, coming in from outside. “Or better yet, don’t.”

“You can cook rice in a solar oven,” Blair suggested. 

“Yeah? Do we have one of those?” Angel asked.

“No, but if you have aluminum foil and a box, we can make one.”

“I’ll have to ask Rosa to liberate some aluminum foil next time,” Angel said. 

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Jim said. “It looks like you landed on your feet, then.” 

Angel nodded. “I met the rest of the kitchen ladies at lunch. They want to fatten me up. It’s like being at home. Are you two staying for dinner?”

Blair and Jim glanced at each other. “I guess so,” Blair said. 

“Great,” Angel said happily. “It’ll be a while, though.”

“Private Solorio’s done digging,” Kas put in. “I just finished checking his work and sent him back to the barracks.”

Jim grimaced and nodded. “I’ll have to go talk to him. First, I’d better tell you about our meeting with the head oil man.”

They all took seats around Angel’s desk. “Before we get to the serious stuff,” Blair said, “they said we’re welcome to use the gym over on their side.”

“Good,” Kas said, poking Angel. “Somebody needs to get his ass on the treadmill.”

Angel poked him back. “As if I don’t have enough problems?”

“They have hot water in the locker room over there,” Blair explained. 

“Ohhhhh,” Angel said. “Good.” 

Blair nodded. “I was thinking I’d have to shave my head rather than try to keep all this clean with no hot water,” he added, pointing at his hair, which by now was nearly as long as it had been before G-TAC picked him up. 

“Not only that, but Rigel invited us to dinner,” Jim added. 

Angel glanced over at his cooking pot in alarm. “Not tonight?”

“Friday,” Jim assured him. 

“I hope you gave our regrets,” Kas said. 

“No,” Jim said. “We all have to go. He’s hiding something.”

“He is?” Angel asked. “What?”

“If I knew that, he wouldn’t be hiding it,” Jim said patiently. “Listen to this. First, he was in a flop sweat before we even got there. Then he tried to feel me out about why we were sent here. I turned the question back on him, and he denied that there were any security problems worth mentioning.”

Blair cleared his throat. “Uh, Jim, there might be a simpler explanation for all that. Maybe he just wants to know why the Army sent him two Sentinels when he _doesn’t_ have any security problems worth mentioning. And as for the sweat, maybe he just went outside. It is kinda hot, if you didn’t notice.”

“I might buy that, Chief, except that his heart rate spiked when I suggested we might want to do some patrols of his drill sites. He’s up to something.”

“Like what?” Angel wondered.

“Could be anything,” Jim said. “Maybe the Army _wasn’t_ lying about the drug cartels, and he’s in bed with them.”

“Jim,” Blair said. He knew Jim _wanted_ there to be a drug cartel—if there was, the Army hadn’t lied to him and hadn’t sent them here just to punish them. But it really seemed like Jim was reaching. 

“It doesn’t have to be that,” Jim said. “Maybe some kind of environmental or labor practice violations—whatever it is, he doesn’t want us to find out about it, and that means I _do_ want to find out about it.”

“Okay,” Kas said, with a quelling look at Angel. “So how do we help?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Jim admitted. “But I want all of us there; maybe we can trick him into saying something.”

“Kas and I could break into his office while you and Angel keep him busy,” Blair suggested. “Since he didn’t actually invite _us_.”

“No,” Jim said. “Just—no. For one thing, if we were breaking into his office, the time to do it would be while he’s in Lima.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s a much better idea,” Blair said. “We could do it at night, when we’re on guard duty, and if anyone finds us in their building, we can just say we assumed we were supposed to patrol in there.” 

“We’re not breaking into anybody’s office,” Jim said. “Yet. We’re going to go to dinner, and keep our ears open, and see if he lets anything slip.”

“Are we going to play ‘good cop, bad cop?’” Angel asked. “Because if we are, I think I should be the good cop.”

“I will be the cop,” Jim said. “You’ll be the civilians.” Before Angel could say anything, he corrected himself, “Army officers. Blair will be the civilian.”

“Trade you?” Angel whispered to Blair. 

“No,” Blair said back. “I’m a conscientious objector.”

“I should have done that,” Angel sighed. 

Kas cleared his throat significantly and said, “You really, really shouldn’t have.”

“I’m not sure that being a C.O. had anything to do with my other problems,” Blair said. “G-TAC hewed to the letter of the law as far as that goes.”

“Still,” Kas said, and gave Angel a squeeze. 

“We’re going to do this investigation very quietly,” Jim went on, “so that Rigel doesn’t even know we’re investigating anything until we have hard evidence of…whatever it is he’s doing.”

“Okay,” Angel said. “Can I go back to cooking now?”

Jim agreed, and the meeting broke up. Jim went off to talk to Private Solorio, while Blair opted to stay with their friends. 

“So, are you all right?” Kas asked. “Want some Gatorade?”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Blair said. “Gatorade?”

“Angel doesn’t quite have the wet bar stocked yet, so it’s all we have right now.”

“No thanks,” Blair said. 

“I’m working on iced coffee, but there’s no ice yet,” Angel added. 

Blair couldn’t think of what to say to that, so he just nodded. Kas and Angel had made a lot more progress in getting settled than he and Jim had—their duffel bags were still packed. 

#

“What do you think, do you guys have time for another hand?” Kas asked, sweeping up the cards and shuffling them. After the monkey funeral and dinner, he had convinced Blair and Jim to stick around for cards, worried that if he had too much time to himself, Angel would fall into a sulk again. It was getting late, though, and Jim and Blair were on duty that night. 

Jim glanced at his watch. “Maybe one more. I want to change and maybe take a shower.” He had put on his class A’s, Kas supposed for the meeting with the oil company manager. He’d lost the jacket and tie before dinner, but Kas could understand why he’d want to change. 

Angel accepted the cards from Kas, saying, “One more hand, make it count. Ante up, gentlemen.”

Money being a useless abstraction in their current circumstances, they were playing for odds and ends out of MRE packages. They paid in with sugar packets and matches; candy, coffee, and toilet paper were the high stakes.

Angel dealt the cards around, announcing the up-cards as he did. “Ace-up for the major…nice start on a flush there, Blair…pair of queens for my devastatingly handsome Guide.”

“No comment,” said Kas. 

Before Angel could deal the last round, they were interrupted. One of the privates—McCaughey, Kas thought his name was—knocked and came into the clinic building. “Sir—sirs? There’s another one of those monkey things out by the perimeter.” 

Jim glanced over his shoulder at him. “So leave it alone,” he suggested. 

“Well, sir, it looks like maybe there’s something wrong with it. I thought you might want to know.” 

Kas couldn’t quite tell, at this point, whether the soldier was genuinely concerned about the monkey or if this was a spectacularly successful form of dumb insolence. If the men were offended by Solorio’s punishment, hassling Jim with constant monkey updates would be a form of revenge that was above reproach.

From Jim’s expression, it didn’t look like he could tell, either. “All right, let’s go have a look. Coming, Chief?”

They all trooped outside to check on the monkey. McCaughey used his flashlight to show where the monkey was, huddled on the ground just outside the fence. “They’re usually real active this time of night; I don’t think I’ve ever seen one on the ground like that. It’s making kind of a funny noise, too.”

“I hear it,” Jim said dryly. The monkey was making a sort of whining, yipping noise, like a dog that had its paw stepped on. 

“It’s smaller than the other one,” Angel pointed out. “Maybe it’s a baby.” 

“It could be the baby of the one Tony shot,” McCaughey suggested. 

“If it was a nursing infant, it would be dead by now,” Angel said distractedly. “Well, somebody go get it.” 

Kas was about to ask just how they ought to do that, with the animal on the other side of a cyclone fence, when he remembered that while they were in a sense prisoners here, they could walk out through the gate. 

Jim glanced down toward where the nearest gate was. “I’ll go. Thanks, McCaughey.”

McCaughey lingered with their little group, not seeming sure if that was a dismissal or not, until Kas told him, “As you were,” and he loped off to patrol the rest of the perimeter. He took his flashlight with him, but the moon was bright enough that even the non-Sentinels could see Jim making his way back toward them along the outside of the fence.

When Jim picked up the little animal, all of the monkeys in the nearby trees went from chittering to screaming. Blair tensed—Kas wondered what he planned to do if they attacked his Sentinel—but relaxed when the monkeys made no move to come down out of the trees. They all made their way back down toward the gate to meet Jim.

When they joined him, Angel reached out to take the animal from him, but Kas said, “Hang on, it might bite,” and took it instead. 

The little monkey was weak, squirming feebly in his hands. “Pulse is fast and weak, breathing shallow and rapid—but who knows what’s normal for these guys.”

“Let’s get him inside, then.”

#

Before they went on duty, Jim and Blair stopped by the clinic to see how Kas and Angel were making out with the marmoset. They found Kas holding the animal on an exam table while Angel slowly injected something into it with a big needle.

“Hi,” Angel said, glancing up at them. “I haven’t found any major injuries, just dehydration. I’m putting in some fluids,” he added, and Blair noticed a bag of IV fluid on the table next to them. “He’s too small for an IV, so I’m putting it in subcutaneously.”

“So he’s going to be okay?”

Angel shrugged. “I’m not sure. We still don’t know why the other ones abandoned him. I don’t think he’s injured, but he could be sick. I’ll have to draw some blood and run some cultures, but I don’t have the equipment to set up a slow enough drip, so we have to do this by hand first. We’ll see.”

They went back outside and took over from Dan McCaughey. “Anything to report?” Jim asked him.

“No, sir. Apart from the monkey, it’s been quiet.”

“Then you are relieved.”

That was a funny thing to say, Blair thought. “How do you know?” he asked as Dan headed back toward the barracks.

“How do I know what?”

“That he’s relieved.”

Jim blinked. “Relieved of duty,” he explained. 

“Oh.” That made sense. “So what do we do?”

“Walk the perimeter.”

Walking the perimeter was interesting enough for the first trip around. In addition to the marmoset troop, Blair noticed signs of several other animal species—nocturnal birds, lots of insects flocking around the floodlights; once he thought he heard the cry of a jaguar. But by the fourth or fifth circuit, he was bored. 

“I wonder how the marmoset’s doing,” he said.

Jim grunted. 

“I hope he’s okay.”

“Let’s go through here,” Jim said, veering away from the fence to start off through the middle of the oil company compound.

“What for? Did you hear something?” He hadn’t heard anything, but then, he wasn’t a Sentinel.

“No,” Jim said. 

“Then what are we doing?”

“It’s a good idea to vary the route when you’re guarding something,” Jim explained. “So the enemy can’t anticipate where you’re going to be.”

Now he got it. “Or where you’re not going to be. If we cut through here, we’ll get back to the other end five minutes or so before anyone would expect, based on how long it took us to get the whole way around the other times. So we’d have the advantage of surprise, right?”

“Right,” Jim said. “Unless they hear you coming.”

“Oh.”

“Say, because somebody’s talking,” Jim added. 

“Now who’s talking?” Blair asked. “I stopped, see? You’re the only one talking.”

Jim grunted again. 

“Great, now we’re back on the caveman routine?”

“Say, why don’t you go check on the monkey?” Jim suggested.

Blair could tell when he was being gotten rid of, but if Jim was going to be that way, fine. He detoured over to the medical building.

There, at least, matters had progressed. Angel was perched on a stool peering into a microscope, while Kas stood nearby with the marmoset clinging to his shoulder. 

“Hey, the little guy looks a lot better,” Blair said. 

Angel glanced up from the microscope. “Yeah, the fluids really perked him up. Looks like what’s-his-name was right, he is a juvenile. The x-rays showed his bones are still cartilaginous. I wish I knew what the fuck I’m looking at here,” he added, gesturing at the microscope, “the white count looks reasonable, but I have no idea what’s normal. If I’d known this was going to happen, I’d have done a necropsy on the other one for a baseline.” 

“We could dig it back up,” Kas suggested.

“That would just be gross,” Angel said. “I’ll do some cultures, see what happens.”

The marmoset started poking through Kas’s hair which, since it was cropped military-short, didn’t seem to be getting him very far. “Ow! Fuck, monkey!” He pried it off of his head; the marmoset promptly clambered up his arm and back to his head. “Are there any plantains left? I think it’s hungry.”

They found leftovers in the small refrigerator and offered the marmoset plantain, papaya, and crackers out of an MRE packet. It turned up its small nose at all of the options. 

“I’m sure we can figure this out,” Blair said. “The shape of an animal’s teeth can tell you a lot about its diet.”

“Great, have a look.” Kas shifted the marmoset over to his shoulder. 

The marmoset seemed happy enough to perch on him, and definitely found his hair more interesting than Kas’s, but Blair couldn’t get a good look at his its teeth. “Do something hostile,” he suggested. “That way it’ll show its teeth as a threat gesture.”

“I’m not going to threaten a monkey!” Kas said. 

Blair thought maybe they should ask Jim, but Angel said, “Try the x-rays.”

On the x-rays, Blair could get a clear look at the teeth. Unfortunately. “Okay,” he said slowly, stalling for time. “Flat teeth would suggest a diet of plants, since those need to be ground between the molars. Sharp teeth for ripping would suggest a meat diet.”

“And what do teeth like _that_ suggest?” Kas asked, pointing at the x-ray.

“I have no idea,” he admitted. “I’m anthropologist, not a primatologist. There weren’t any early hominids with teeth like that.”

“Well, it was a good try,” Angel said. “We already tried fruit. And the teeth are wrong for meat and leaves, so what’s left?”

“Insects?” Blair suggested, trying to remember his undergrad physical anthropology classes. Unfortunately, those too had focused on characteristics that the great apes shared with early hominids. There hadn’t been much about the lower primates. “Some species of lemurs have a specialized finger and claw for digging insects and grubs out of logs,” he remembered.

“Does our guy have that?” Kas asked.

“Well, no.” He examined one of the marmoset’s paws. It had short, flat nails. Adapted mostly for climbing. 

“Here,” Angel said, abandoning his microscope and rummaging through the refrigerator again. “Try this,” he said, holding out an opened can.

“Something tells me condensed milk is _not_ its natural diet,” Kas pointed out. 

“It might work.”

They didn’t have any better ideas, so they tried feeding it some condensed milk with an eyedropper. The marmoset seemed to like it, but Blair was concerned that if he was lactose intolerant, they were going to have one hell of a mess on their hands. 

“If we were home, we could just go to the library and look up what these guys eat,” Angel said.

“If we were home, we wouldn’t have monkeys in the backyard,” Kas answered.

“I’m an idiot,” Blair realized. 

“Hm?”

“We have a whole troop of these guys in the backyard,” Blair explained. “And an anthropologist. If I can’t figure out what they eat, the university should take my degrees back. I’m just going to need some binoculars.”

#

 

When Blair returned from the clinic, he was toting binoculars, a notebook and—a pair of night vision goggles. “What are those for?” Jim asked, not entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer.

But Blair explained that he needed them to study the monkeys—sorry, _marmosets_ —to find out what they ate. Jim left him stationed just inside the fence near the group of trees the marmosets seemed to like best and resumed patrolling. When he stopped back to check on his Guide, Blair scolded him for talking and disrupting the animals’ normal behavior patterns. 

Whatever. As long as Blair was happy.

There wasn’t any activity to speak of for the rest of the night, not even from the marmosets. As dawn broke, though, the marmosets and other jungle animals woke up and started screaming at each other. In the distance a jaguar cried, silencing the smaller animals for a moment. 

After handing over the watch to Private Solorio, Jim went to retrieve his Guide. “We’re done,” he said. “Let’s go get some breakfast.”

“Not now,” Blair said, glancing back and forth quickly between the binoculars and his notebook. “I’m finally getting some good data. Should have known from the size of the eyes these guys would be crepuscular, not nocturnal. They’ll probably go to sleep for the day in a couple hours; I’ll eat then.”

Jim stood there for a moment, then shrugged and headed off to chow. 

#

“Huh,” Kas said, nudging Jim, as they walked back to the medical hut from the chow hall. Corporal Lennox and Private Solorio had the watch, and both were standing by the entry gate to the compound, chatting, rifles slung over their backs. 

“Huh,” Jim agreed. The two men didn’t appear to be alert for danger, and in any case, shouldn’t have been “guarding” the same section of the compound. “We’re going to have to do something about that.” It was understandable that the men were getting careless with nothing to do, but it was his job as the commanding officer to help them keep their minds on their jobs. 

Kas nodded. “I have a few ideas kicking around for training exercises—I’ll think it over a little more and give you a proposal soon. For now, permission to go see if they’re paying attention?”

Jim nodded. “Yeah. Have fun. Let me know what happens.” He wished he could do it himself, but it was really the kind of thing he should delegate to his XO. 

Kas grinned and handed Jim the carryout food container he was taking back for Angel before taking off for one of the many unguarded sections of perimeter. 

That left Jim to deliver breakfast to the rest of the gang. Turning up his hearing as he approached the clinic, he discovered that his Guide was already there. “—dunno, he just looks like a Larry,” Blair was saying. 

After a long pause, Angel said, “I don’t really see it, but okay. Here, try this shirt; I’ve never liked it.”

“Didn’t you buy that at the Army Wal-Mart, man? Like a couple of weeks ago?”

“Yes, and in those couple of weeks, I have not liked it. Hi, Jim,” Angel said as he stepped up onto the clinic stoop.

“Hi,” he answered as the door opened in front of him.

“Where’s Kas?” Angel asked.

“Frightening some enlisted men,” Jim answered, handing him his food and putting Blair’s on the desk near where his Guide was trying to fashion a scrap of cloth into a monkey-diaper. 

“Oh,” Angel said vaguely, opening his food carton. “He’s good at that. Blair found out lots of things about the marmosets.”

“Turns out they eat the gum and sap just under the bark of certain trees,” Blair reported. “Maybe insects, too—it was hard to tell. I should have guessed it from the teeth—see how his incisors are specialized to scrape off the bark? I don’t know how we’re going to feed him, though, unless we try cutting some branches.”

“Would maple syrup work?” Angel asked. “That comes from trees. Seems like it should.”

“Maybe, if we had any.”

Angel smirked and tossed him a plastic packet out of his breakfast box. 

Blair caught it. “Oh. Worth a shot, I guess.”

“You have some, too,” Jim told him. “They had French toast today.” 

Angel had a pot of coffee on; Jim accepted a cup and sat with them. 

“I think I found out how Larry ended up on his own,” Blair informed him as he ate. “The males and adolescents spend a lot of time carrying the babies around, so probably somebody else had him while his mother was getting shot. Eventually the babysitter went to hand him back over to his mom, and couldn’t find her. By then he was all hungry and tired and cranky, and probably nobody wanted to deal with him anymore. Poor kid.” 

The “kid” was perched on Blair’s knee, holding the maple syrup tub with both front paws and licking furiously. Somebody was going to have to give the monkey a bath when he was done with breakfast.

Jim wondered if in Kas’s absence he was supposed to nag Angel about eating, or if that job would fall to Blair. But after a certain amount of eyeballing, poking, and fussing with the remaining container of syrup, Angel started tucking away the French toast and sausage. 

Kas came back and explained, with much headshaking and poorly-concealed glee, how he had managed to sneak up on the hapless guards and scare the crap out of them. “They’re paying attention now,” he finished.

“You’re lucky they didn’t shoot you,” Angel said. 

“If I thought they had rounds chambered in a non-combat situation like this, they’d be in even deeper shit than they are now,” Jim said. 

“Exactly,” Kas added, patting Angel. 

After breakfast, they went off to bed, taking Larry the monkey with them. Blair made a nest for it on the dresser. As he was about to drop off to sleep, a hairy, sticky, smelly bundle of monkey squirmed in between his chest and Blair’s back, but he was too tired to care.

Over the next few days, they settled in. Kas kept himself busy and entertained devising training exercises for the enlisted men, while Blair alternated between observing the local wildlife and typing out his article on the manual typewriter in Jim’s office. Just about every day, one or another of the kitchen ladies brought Angel a sick child or elderly person to examine, and both Blair and Angel fussed over the monkey in their spare hours. Angel spent a great deal of time picking fleas and ticks off the monkey and depositing them in a small dish of kerosene, which Jim thought was disgusting, but since it was still sleeping with him and Blair, he couldn’t really argue about it. When they weren’t dealing with the monkey, Angel cooked increasingly elaborate meals, and Blair tinkered with the solar oven that apparently wasn’t working quite as well as he had anticipated. 

Only Jim found himself without much to occupy himself. He had the daily reports to do, but since nothing ever happened, they didn’t take much time. He took to listening in on conversations over on the oil company side of the compound, hoping that he’d hear something about whatever it was they were hiding, but whatever it was, the workers either didn’t know about it or didn’t talk about it. 

On Friday evening, Jim dressed in his class A’s for the dinner with Rigel. Slinging the jacket over his shoulder—he’d wait to put it on until they were in the air conditioning—he found Blair typing away at his desk. “You want to get ready, Chief?”

“I’m ready,” Blair said. 

“You’re wearing that?” Blair had on jeans and a khaki t-shirt.

“What do you want me to wear, the G-TAC suit?”

He had a point. “At least tuck your shirt in.”

They picked up Kas and Angel at the medical building and proceeded over to the Cyclops side of the compound. Even with his jacket off, by the time they arrived, Jim had sweated through his shirt and his tie was a limp rag. Flora, the secretary, showed them to a sitting room where he introduced them to the other guests, two Peruvian government ministers and their wives. Jim missed their names and specific titles because he was distracted by one minister’s hair, a pompadour of surprising height. 

“Something to drink, Major? Captain?” he asked, gesturing toward a well-stocked wet bar. 

“Beer, if you have it,” Jim said. “Chief, you want something?”

“Beer’s okay,” Blair agreed. 

Looking sour, Rigel sent Flora to get the drinks—apparently “cocktail waitress” was part of the secretary’s job description. Angel asked for “ _Una mentirita, por favor_ ,” and went over to help Flora make it.

“Never heard of that one,” Rigel said, his tone cheerful, but looking at Angel with suspicion.

“It’s just a rum and Coke with lime,” Kas explained.

Returning with a glass in each hand and giving one to Kas, Angel added, “We call it that because _Cuba_ isn’t _Libre_.”

One of the Peruvian ministers asked Angel something in rapid Spanish; Jim caught the word “Castro,” but nothing else. Rigel looked just as clueless as Jim as to what they were talking about; apparently, despite being in charge of operations in a Spanish-speaking country, he didn’t speak the language.

After they finished their drinks, on some signal that even Jim didn’t hear, they all moved into the dining room. It was paneled, with a glossy expanse of mahogany table set with china and silver, and the walls were hung with the heads of deer and puma. One of these was a black puma; Jim looked at it with distaste before sitting down. One of the cafeteria ladies, sporting a black dress with white cuffs and collar for the occasion, began serving salads. 

The salads were beautiful compared to the vats of iceberg lettuce and shreds of limp carrot the cafeteria sometimes served—and that Sandburg sometimes insisted he eat—but the jade-green spinach and coral-colored tomatoes were flavorless except for the faint tang of wax and preservative wash. The vegetables Angel got from his village friends, while not as pretty, were bursting with nuanced flavor.

As they ate, Jim tried to draw Rigel into conversation about the oil company’s troubles with the natives—hoping to find some clue as to what it was Rigel didn’t want them to know—but whenever he began to succeed, one of the ministers’ wives would say, “Let’s not talk about business!” and ask Rigel about a concert or party he’d been to while in Lima. 

At least he got a good steak out of the deal, though. The steaks were as rich and tender as butter. Served medium-rare, they made a nice change from Angel’s cooking which, while very good, was based on tough, scrawny cuts of meat he got from the village and that had to be autoclaved to tenderness. When Jim commented on this, Rigel said, “They’re all right. Argentine. You can’t get Kobe beef down here.”

Rigel was, Jim decided, a little bit of an asshole. 

After a dessert of chocolate cake topped with ice cream, caramel, chocolate sauce, and pecans—and probably amassing enough calories to feed the village for a week—the women retreated to the sitting room and Rigel sent Flora to “Bring that box from my office.”

Flora returned with a hardwood box crammed full of cigars. “You mind cigar smoke, Major? No? Good. I have some Cubans in here, Captain,” he said to Angel. “Perfectly legal, as long as I smoke them before I go back stateside,” he added with a laugh. “You want a Monte Cristo? They’re the best—two hundred American a box.”

Angel smiled frostily. “I wouldn’t smoke one of Castro’s cigars on a bet.” He rummaged through the box that Rigel, slightly taken aback, was still holding out in his direction. “Here, let me see if you have any of _Tio_ Pepe’s.”

“Tio Pepe’s is Spanish sherry,” Rigel said, less friendly now that Angel had spurned his prize cigars.

“It’s his actual uncle Pepe that makes them,” Kas explained. “They’re called something else on the label.”

“Well, my grandfather’s _compadre_ ,” Angel said. “Here,” he said, coming out of the box with a fistful of cigars. “ _These_ are the best. Rolled in Little Havana from tobacco grown in the Dominican Republic. My grandfather won’t smoke anything else.” He smirked and added, “Fifty dollars a box, American.”

The pompadoured minister accepted the cigar Angel recommended, while the other said that he, like Angel, would show some patriotism and smoke the product of his own country. Jim declined to smoke anything—being in the room with them was bad enough—so Rigel was left to enjoy his overpriced Cubans alone.

With the ladies out of the room, Jim was finally able to successfully turn the conversation to business. “I’ve heard the local indigenous people aren’t too happy about having Cyclops here,” he said. 

One of the ministers sighed. “It is an ongoing struggle, to bring the remote people into the twentieth century. They prefer their old ways, but the rest of the country prefers progress. What can you do?” he asked with a shrug. 

“As in your own country, we must balance the wishes of the minority with the needs of the majority,” the other minister added. 

“It’s really nothing you need to worry about,” Rigel said. “The Indians can be a nuisance, but they aren’t dangerous.”

His heart rate was accelerating, though—this wasn’t a topic he wanted to discuss. Jim pressed on. “Still, it’s best to keep these kinds of problems from escalating. Has anyone asked them how they feel about it, and what Cyclops might do to be more culturally sensitive?”

“A protected area was set aside for the indigenous people,” the first minister said. “If they would stay there, they wouldn’t be bothered by our North American friends.”

He seemed calm, but the Rigel and the other minster both showed increasing signs of anxiety. Getting warmer…

“But oil drilling is ecologically disruptive even to neighboring areas,” Blair pointed out. “Your activities here could be altering the migratory patterns of game they rely on to live, driving them to leave the protected area to find food.”

Cooler. Rigel said, “We filed all the appropriate environmental impact studies. We aren’t disrupting any endangered species.”

“Yeah, people don’t usually eat endangered species,” Blair said. “What about the environmental impact on common species?”

“If the indigenous residents are no longer able to sustain their traditional way of life,” the first minister said, “they are welcome to settle in the cities like everyone else. Financial assistance is provided.” 

“This is an internal Peruvian matter,” the second minister added. “We will of course render all due assistance if the North American military are not able to protect their nationals from our Indians.”

And that was pretty much that. After Rigel offered a second round of brandy and everyone declined, they went back outside into the muggy heat.

“You’re right,” Angel said as they crossed back over to their own side of the compound. “That smug asshole is hiding something. Besides his commie cigars.”

“I know,” said Jim. “Any idea what?”

“No. Something to do with the Indians.” After a few more steps he added, “And Senor Garcia’s in on it.”

“Which one was Garcia again?”

“The Minister of the Interior. With the hair.”

“Oh, him. Yeah, I thought so too.”

“Venegas I thought was all right,” Angel added. “I think the others were letting him do most of the talking, because whatever it is that’s going on, he doesn’t know about it. Either that or he’s a complete sociopath and can lie without any tells, but I doubt it.”

“That was my read, too.” But they still didn’t have any clues about what the big secret was. 

#

On Sunday, as they ate breakfast, Rosa came to their table with a papaya milkshake for Angel and said that her son was coming with the ox cart after the meal, if he wanted to go down to the village for church.

After Angel agreed, Blair said, “Hey, can I come too?” He wasn’t Catholic—far from it—but he figured going to a Catholic church service in a remote Peruvian village might be anthropologically interesting.

“You would be most welcome, Senor Blair,” she told him in English.

“Hang on, Chief,” Jim said. “We have that meeting with Rigel today.”

That’s right; he and Kas had decided to take some of the soldiers out to the Cyclops drill site that week, on the pretext of a training exercise, but really so that they could try to figure out what exactly it was that Rigel had up his sleeve. Rigel was, predictably, dragging his feet, and they had scheduled a meeting with him to hash it out. “You don’t really need me there, do you?”

“No, but I’m not crazy about you going off by yourself,” Jim answered.

“Neither am I,” Kas added.

“Well, we won’t by ourselves,” Blair pointed out. “We’ll both be there.”

“And Rosa and her son,” Angel said. “And the priest. And the whole rest of the village.”

After extended negotiations, in which Blair reminded Jim that a party of old women made the journey from the village to the compound every day of the week, on foot, it was eventually agreed that Blair and Angel would go. It was left a little vague exactly which of them was supposed to be protecting the other. 

After Rosa left their table to make preparations for the trip, Angel almost undid the whole thing by saying, “Guide-swapping—kinky.”

But eventually, Blair got Jim settled down and they left, taking Larry along in a sling Blair had made out of a towel and an old t-shirt. They had learned that Larry would sleep through the day as long as he was in physical contact with one of them, but would wake up and raise hell if they tried to leave him alone. Since both of the little marmoset’s primary caregivers were going, Larry was going too.

As they rode down the narrow, twisting mountain path—Blair thought that walking would have been easier and safer—Rosa explained that their church service was late in the morning because they shared their priest with another village. He lived in the other village and celebrated there first. 

“Does your village have a Sentinel?” Blair asked.

Rosa said that it didn’t, but, “When we dug the new well, one came from the other village to make it.”

That didn’t make much sense to Blair. What did a Sentinel have to do with a well? But Rosa insisted on speaking to him in English, and her English wasn’t particularly good. “A well?” he asked her in Spanish. “A Sentinel came to dig the well?”

“Not to dig with the shovel,” Rosa said in English. “He told us where to dig, yes.”

Choosing the site for a well still didn’t seem like a Sentinel thing, unless maybe he was a civil engineer or a geologist as well as a Sentinel, which Blair supposed was possible. It would be unheard of in the US and unusual in Europe, where Sentinels were funneled into military and law enforcement careers, but he didn’t know much about non-tribal Sentinels in non-industrialized nations. “Why did you have a Sentinel tell you where to dig your well?” he asked.

“Because he knew where the water was,” Rosa said uncertainly, as if she thought she might be misunderstanding the question. “Don’t your Sentinels know where to find water?”

“Not usually,” Angel told her. “I suppose we could hear groundwater…or maybe smell it…if we learned how.”

“I do not know how the Sentinel knew,” Rosa admitted. “Perhaps the priest or the mayor could say.”

Reminding himself, as he often had to on expeditions, that people trying to live their lives were not obligated to indulge his curiosity, Blair thanked her and allowed the conversation to move on. 

Arriving at the village, he and Angel went ahead to the small stone church while Rosa and the other women went to their homes to change into their Sunday clothes. Made of whitewashed stone with a thatched roof and a small bell tower, the church was almost unbelievably picturesque. The church bell began ringing as they approached; when it stopped, a young man in a white smock ran out of the tower and into the church. 

The doors were already standing open, so they went inside. Small altars to various saints were set up in niches along the walls; Blair entertained himself by observing how aspects of indigenous deities had been mapped onto the Catholic saints.

The service itself was considerably less interesting. Blair was still trying to develop an ear for the Peruvian version of Spanish, and liturgical Peruvian Spanish proved to be completely beyond him. He was secretly relieved when partway through the mass, Larry woke up, perched on Blair’s head, and started to hoot. 

Muttering, “Sorry! Sorry!” to everyone he passed, he hurried the marmoset out of the church. He had just managed to coax Larry back into his pouch, and was singing him a lullaby, when a young woman with a crying infant came outside. Larry sprang back out of the pouch and back up onto Blair’s head. He and the young mother shared sympathetic looks as they paced back and forth in front of the church and their respective charges competed with each other for volume. 

Eventually, the baby fell asleep and the woman went back inside. Larry eventually quieted down, but Blair decided not to risk going back in. Instead he wandered around looking at the village. There wasn’t much to it—about fifteen homes, the church, a small store that was of course closed for the Sabbath, and another building that he thought might be both town hall and school. 

But there was one thing of interest—a telephone line going into the school/town hall. That must be some of the “infrastructure” Ed Rigel had talked about—after paying through the nose to have the line run up to the Cyclops compound, it would have been trivial to run a line into the village. But unlike the phone in Rigel’s office, they could use this one discreetly.

The building, of course, was locked, but tomorrow, Monday, it wouldn’t be. 

The question was, who to call? He didn’t have a current number for Naomi—he hadn’t known exactly where she was before his abduction, and there was really no way to guess where she might have gone now. Was it possible to connect to email from the town hall? Probably not.

He was still thinking about it when the church service let out. “Look,” he said when he caught up with Angel, nodding up at the phone line.

“Okay. What am I looking at?”

“ _Look_.”

“Oh! Hey, I should call my mother.”

While Blair had been thinking the same thing, he kind of doubted that Angel’s mother was an experienced grassroots organizer. “Your mother, okay. Is there anyone else we might want to get in touch with?” 

“Oh, yeah. The hospital, too. And your police department.”

“Maybe some of your political friends,” Blair suggested.

“Oh…well, maybe. Don’t you think we might get in trouble?”

“Once again, what are they going to do? Kidnap us and send us to Peru?”

“Well…it could be worse. It could be Antarctica. I think we’d better talk to Jim and Kas about what to do. Anyway, we’re invited to lunch. Come on.”

At Rosa’s house, she presided over the kitchen while a flight of daughters-in-law hurried to do her bidding. Angel asked meekly if he could help, but he and Blair were both gently but firmly sent outside where the old men sat on plastic lawn chairs and the young men sat on their heels, gossiping. It was evidently unthinkable for either of them to sit on the ground, though, so they stood awkwardly while two boys were dispatched to nearby homes to fetch suitable seating.

There were black and brown chickens wandering around the yard. When Blair politely admired them, the householder offered to sell him one for two dollars American. Blair said no, thank you—he didn’t have any money, among other things—but Angel was interested. Each chicken was caught in turn and brought to Angel for inspection, until he finally selected one to be slaughtered, dressed, and delivered on Tuesday. The chosen bird’s leg was banded with a strip of cloth and it was released to enjoy its last two days of life.

Angel had just entered into negotiations with another man on the subject of eggs when the boys carried a large table out of Rosa’s house and the daughters-in-law started bringing out bowls and platters of food. Apparently the house wasn’t large enough to hold all of the family plus honored guests. Blair noticed that while there were a lot of dishes, there wasn’t very much of anything. The family had obviously gone to a lot of effort to put together an impressive meal, and Angel and Blair were given helpings of everything.

Angel and Rosa talked animatedly about recipes and cooking techniques. As the meal wound down, various people disappeared briefly from the table and returned with vegetables and other foodstuffs that were presented to Angel for consideration. He wound up having to also buy a woven straw bag to carry everything home in.

When dessert was served—a slightly spicy, violently purple jelly—Larry woke up and made a dive for Blair’s bowl. It would have proven impossible to defend his dessert, but the children, fascinated, competed to feed the greedy marmoset globs of their own dessert. 

Even after the purple substance was gone, Larry remained awake, perched on Blair’s head, while the children flocked around to pet him and attempt to feed him bits of other food, which he always eagerly accepted then dropped in Blair’s hair. 

Two young kids, maybe six or eight years old, held a whispered consultation and ran off toward a nearby outbuilding. They returned moments later with twin baby llamas—or maybe alpacas, Blair wasn’t clear on the difference. With their big eyes and knobby knees, they were undeniably charming. Angel, who didn’t have to try to keep Larry from jumping on the llamas or screaming at them, was enchanted with petting the llamas and feeding them handfuls of grass.

The kids had another whispered conversation and said boldly, “The female isn’t for sale, but thirty dollars for that one.”

Angel reached for his wallet. 

“You’re not going to _cook_ it,” Blair said, horrified. Fortunately, he said it in English.

“Of course not,” Angel answered, also in English. “We can keep it for a pet.”

That was almost worse. What was Kas going to say if he brought Angel back to the base with a pet llama? Jim wouldn’t be too happy about it, either. “Is it old enough to be away from its mother?”

The kids confirmed that it was, their mother corroborated their story. 

“It’ll be fine, Blair—he’ll be a lot less trouble than Larry,” Angel said breezily.

“It would almost have to be. What about when we go back to Cascade?”

“We have a big yard,” Angel answered, stroking the baby llama’s ears. 

“Don’t you think it might be too cold?”

“I’ll buy him a blanket.” 

Angel had an answer for everything. “Well, you can’t just let it wander around the base. Jim would have a stroke.”

They had lapsed back into Spanish, and one of the boys said eagerly that he and his brother could build a very nice pen for an additional ten dollars American.

Blair at last convinced Angel to leave the llama in the village until after he had discussed arrangements with Kas and Jim. It was the best he could do, and it at least gave Jim and Kas a chance to take a shot at dissuading him. But Angel did put half down on the llama, so Blair had a sneaking suspicion that eventually, Angel was going to end up with a llama. 

Angel only briefly turned the llama back over to the children when some of his patients from earlier in the week came by, and he went inside the house to re-examine them in privacy. Afterwards, the women and children began drifting away, and unlabeled bottles of some potent local hooch were brought out. Blair, experienced with this sort of thing, stuck to the smallest helpings that politeness permitted, but Angel soon ended up sprawled on the ground with his llama in his lap, singing to it. 

Kas was so going to kill him.

#

“Your head wouldn’t hurt so much if you’d shown some common sense yesterday,” Kas said, prodding Angel up the path. Blair had brought his Sentinel back from church well after dark, Blair tipsy and Angel plastered. It had been their night on watch, but they’d had to switch as Blair was somewhat less incapacitated than Angel. No one was very happy about getting up, or in Blair and Jim’s case staying up, at dawn to hike out to the drill site with the oil workers, but after the difficulty they’d had convincing Rigel to cooperate, they weren’t about to reschedule. 

They also hadn’t been able to come to any kind of agreement among themselves about who could safely be left behind from the expedition. Jim, of course, had to go because he was the one who was keen on finding out what Cyclops was hiding. Since it was ostensibly a training exercise for the three Privates, Kas also had to be there. Blair had been sleepily obstinate about Jim conducting an investigation without him, and Angel had grumpily argued that if _everyone_ was going, it didn’t make much sense for him to stay and mind the infirmary, did it, and anyway, there might be bears.

“Water,” Angel groaned, holding out his hand. Kas put a bottle in his hand and he downed half of it. “Aspirin.” He held out his other hand.

“You already had four.” 

Angel groaned again. 

“Do you have some more?” Blair asked, turning up at his elbow. “Here, I’ll trade you my extra sunglasses.”

Kas handed him some aspirin and passed Angel the sunglasses. 

“Ooh, that’s better,” Angel said. “Now it’s only like having sharp sticks jammed into my eyes.”

“Think how much better you’d feel if you had to get up and muck out your llama,” Blair said. 

“Wait a minute.” Angel had come home mumbling something about a llama and thirty dollars, but Kas had assumed that it was some kind of handicraft, or possibly llama meat or llama fiber. “You bought an _actual llama_?”

“Well. Just a little one.”

“How drunk _were_ you?”

Angel made a vague noise. Blair said, “Oh, he bought the llama well before they brought out the moonshine.” 

“It was really cute,” Angel said. “With these eyelashes…I promise you’ll like it.”

“Angel,” Kas sighed.

“Well, you said we couldn’t have a dog because we’re not home enough. Llamas live outside. Blair said we have to buy it a jacket,” he added. “For winter.”

“Yeah, thanks, Blair,” Kas said. He knew letting Angel go to the village without him would be a mistake. He wanted to blame Blair, but then, he hadn’t exactly thought to warn him not to allow Angel to buy any live animals. 

“I tried to talk him out of it,” Blair said. “The best I could do was to get him to talk to you before he brought it home.”

“Oh. Thanks,” he said, more sincerely. Maybe he could convince Angel to leave the llama where it was. The villagers probably wouldn’t mind keeping it for him if he paid handsomely for its upkeep. 

“He could probably get out of buying it if he gives up the half down,” Blair added. 

“I _want_ to buy it,” Angel said pitifully. “It’s a very nice llama.”

Kas decided they’d talk about it another time.

Angel, unfortunately, had other plans. “If we had a llama, it could carry our lunch.”

“It’s a baby,” Blair pointed out. “It can’t carry anything.”

“Also, you already have me to carry your stuff,” Kas added. Angel had a small daypack with a first aid kit and some water in it, but Kas was the one carrying the extensive picnic lunch that the kitchen ladies had made for Angel. Jim had another pack with some Army-issue gear in it, and Blair had the monkey and the monkey’s diaper bag. 

“You could lead the llama, if you wanted to,” Angel offered.

“Gosh, thanks.” 

The drill site, when they reached it, was quieter than Kas would have expected. A diesel generator and a some kind of pumping mechanism were running, but a lot of the machinery appeared idle. There were also fewer workers there than he would have expected—surely there were more people than this in the cafeteria for most meals. Did more of them than he would have expected work in administration?

With a mental shrug, he got Angel settled in an out of the way spot and directed the men to set up a perimeter. 

#

Jim knelt to examine something in the underbrush. “Hm.”

“What is it?” Blair asked. He couldn’t see anything where Jim was looking—but then, he wasn’t a Sentinel.

“Jaguar track,” Jim said. 

“This close to the drill site?” Jaguars were pretty shy; they weren’t likely to hang around where there were people unless they were experiencing some pretty severe habitat pressure. And a pretty big area around the drill site had been clear-cut, so there would be no game or anything else to attract a jaguar to this area.

“Uh-huh.” Jim took a few more steps, crouched over to study the ground. He paused again and plucked something from a bush—a single hair. “Black,” Jim said, holding it up. 

“So? They come in black.”

“I know they do.” Jim hesitated. “When I was in Peru before….”

“Yeah?” Jim didn’t, as a rule, talk about that time. Blair knew that his Guide had been killed, along with many of the rest of Jim’s men, and he’d taken it hard. Was there some sort of jaguar-related trauma too?

“Now, don’t get all excited about this, Chief,” Jim warned him.

“Excited about what?”

“There was a black jaguar. Hanging around.”

“…okay…”

“But I was the only one who ever saw it. Apart from the Chopec shaman.”

“Holy shit,” Blair said. Did Jim realize what he was saying? A jaguar, visible only to him and the shaman-Guide—it had to be a spirit animal. But North American Sentinels didn’t have them. “Shit, Jim, do you think it’s _here_?” He looked around. He didn’t see one, but a spirit animal could appear at any time. “This is too cool, man. There are no documented instances of a Sentinel—or a Guide—from an industrialized society manifesting a spirit animal.”

“I said, don’t get excited. Anyway,” he added, “maybe it was the shaman who ‘manifested’ it.” Blair could hear the scare-quotes Jim put around the word. 

“What about this one?” Blair asked.

“It could be a real—a regular one.” 

Blair tried to get Jim to fill in some of the details about the earlier spirit animal, but Jim shut him down with a terse, “Not now, Chief.”

By lunchtime, Jim had found several more things that led him to say, “Hm,” and look pensive, but he didn’t explain any of them to Blair. They made their way back to the clearing, where Angel was setting out their lunch. 

The three soldiers were eating MREs, and the oil company men had potato chips, apples, and sandwiches on processed white bread. Tuna, from the scent that wafted over from their lunch area. Their own lunch consisted of thick sandwiches on crusty bread, piled high with ham and tomatoes; a salad made of black beans and corn dressed with olive oil, chilies, and cilantro; and thermoses of iced coffee and something that reminded Blair of Orangina. Kas and Jim looked faintly embarrassed to be eating it. 

“Where did you _get_ all this stuff?” Jim asked as they tucked in. 

“Some of it’s local. Rosa sent one of her grandsons to the city for the rest. Why, did you want me to get something for you?”

“No,” said Jim. “Thanks.”

“Aren’t you going to run out of money soon?” Blair asked, thinking of the way Angel had been throwing money around the day before.

“He carries ridiculous amounts of cash all the time,” Kas explained. “Concealed in various places about his person.” 

Angel nodded. “I started doing it because there was this rumor years ago that Fidel had secret squads forcibly repatriating Sentinels back to Cuba.”

“Which there’s no evidence has ever actually happened,” Kas added. “And anyway, you were born in Miami.”

“Still, it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. And here I am, abducted to South America, living in greatly enhanced comfort because I had the sense and forethought to hollow out the heels of my shoes and fill them with twenties.”

“And you were only off by a few minor details, such as what country you’d be abducted to and which country would do the abducting,” Kas said. “And that you’re using the money to buy food and livestock, not to bribe your way out.”

“Well, I can’t exactly bribe my way back to the States when they’re the ones who sent us here to begin with,” Angel pointed out. 

That reminded Blair of his discovery the day before. “Hey, we found out yesterday that the village has a phone.”

“That’s nice, Chief,” Jim said.

“Which we could use to alert interested parties to our situation,” Blair explained. 

“No, we can’t,” Jim answered.

“Why not?”

“Because our mission is classified,” Jim said. 

“Oh, come on!” Blair said. He knew Jim had a more-than-healthy respect for hierarchy, but insisting that they treat this ridiculous mission as if it was some kind of state secret was just insane.

“No, he’s right,” Kas said. “It doesn’t matter if it makes sense for the mission to be classified or not; if we reveal it we could be court-martialed for treason.”

“Yeah,” said Angel, nodding. “I knew there was some kind of reason Kas would know.”

“Seriously?” Blair asked. “Treason? Isn’t that kind of an overreaction?”

“Based on past experience, are you expecting a proportional response, Chief?”

Blair winced. “Good point.”

“We might be able to get away with calling somebody if we don’t say anything about where we are and why,” Jim added, “but I don’t want to risk it.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe not,” Blair admitted. 

“Really,” Jim continued. “Don’t try it. The smart choices here are either to play along, or pretend to play along until we can figure out a plan to get to a country that won’t extradite us. Doing something stupid to make a point is not going to help anybody.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” Geez, try to walk out of the apartment where you were being held prisoner, and almost get shot, just one time, and you were branded for life.

“Promise me, you start getting any righteous impulses, you’ll talk to the rest of us before you do anything that’ll get us thrown in jail,” Jim said. 

“Okay, I promise.”

“Seriously,” Jim said.

“Yes, I know. Seriously. On my mother’s grave. Scout’s honor.” Blair held up three fingers in what he thought was the Boy Scout salute.

“Your mother’s alive,” Jim pointed out. “And I’m pretty sure you were never a Boy Scout.”

“Whatever,” Blair said. “But I get it. I’ll stick to the plan. You can trust me.” 

Jim studied him for a moment then nodded, apparently satisfied. “Okay.”

Angel got out some cookies for dessert, and after eating those Jim wanted to return to his investigation. “You all right keeping Larry for a while?” Blair asked Angel. 

“Sure,” Angel said. “I think we’ll take a nap.”

Several hours later, Blair was wishing he had stayed in the clearing on Larry-duty. Jim was no more communicative about whatever evidence he was finding, and Blair was hot, sticky, and bored. To top it all off, his morning headache was returning. 

He rubbed at his forehead, then ran smack into Jim, who had stopped walking for no apparent reason. Jim steadied him, then said, “We have to get back.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. Kas says to hurry back.”

They hurried. They had been walking for a long time, but very slowly, stopping often for Jim to examine things invisible to normal senses, and taking a very circuitous route. It seemed to Blair that they couldn’t be far from the drill site, but now that they were trying to make good time, the undergrowth seemed denser and the terrain more treacherous. Jim was able to identify a direct line back to the clearing, but they often found the way blocked by fallen trees or impenetrable thickets. “I don’t smell any blood,” Jim said when they were close enough for Blair to be able to hear the sounds of the machinery.

“That’s good,” Blair said. 

“Yes, I hear you,” Jim said. “We’re on our way, just hold your horses.”

“Who are you talking to?” Blair asked. “Not the jaguar?”

Jim paused long enough to give him a withering look. “Angel.”

Oh, right. 

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” Jim said. That was downright weird, Jim talking in a normal conversational tone of voice to someone who was nowhere in sight, when he wasn’t holding a phone or anything. “Okay, have Kas explain it.” After a moment Jim said, “Shit,” and broke into a jog.

Blair wanted to ask if they ought to have some kind of policy about keeping the Guide in the loop, but had to concentrate on keeping up with Jim and not falling on his face. After a few minutes, Jim slowed to a casual stroll. Blair caught up with him and started, “You want to tell me--”

Jim held up his hand. “Quiet.”

They broke out of the jungle and into the clearing. Everything looked pretty much as it had when they had left—machines pumping, oil company workers standing around them making adjustments, Angel lolling in a shady spot with Larry. Kas said something to the three soldiers, who were standing near a Cyclops truck, and came over to join them where they were meeting up with Angel. 

“What’s going on?” Blair asked.

Kas motioned him closer. “The foreman over there, George? He just got a call on his radio telling him to keep us out here as long as possible. Angel heard it.” 

Angel shook his head. “People always seem to forget I’m a Sentinel. He was hiding behind the—whatever that thing is over there, like that would stop me. Whoever he was talking to didn’t tell him what was going on, just to fake some kind of emergency and keep us out here as long he could. I did not get the impression they’re planning a surprise party for us.”

“So I figure you want to get back to the base as fast as possible,” Kas said to Jim.

“Damn right I do. We have to get control of that truck.” They had hiked out that morning, while the Cyclops workers rode out in the truck, to maintain their cover as a training exercise. “And the radio, if we can, so we can leave these guys to walk home with no way to warn them that we’re coming.”

“Right,” Kas said. “I told the men that the Cyclops people will be playing the hostiles in our training game. They’re ready to capture the truck on your mark.”

That took the wind out of Jim’s sails. “Oh.”

“He really is good at this,” Angel said loyally, with an admiring look at Kas.

Kas went on, “After you give the signal, the men are going to give us five minutes to head down the trail to the rendezvous point. That way, we won’t be here to witness how the Cyclops crew are clearly unaware of their role in the training exercise, so we’ll have plausible deniability if when we get back, things haven’t so thoroughly gone to shit that we won’t be asked inconvenient questions.”

“What’s the rendezvous point?” Blair asked, just in case they got separated.

“That big rock that looks sort of like a butt.”

“Good choice,” Angel said with a snicker.

“Blair,” Kas continued, “if we get back and it looks like we’re going to need that plausible deniability, your job is to write up a memo asking the Cyclops people for their help with our training exercise, and find some way to make it look like it got lost on the way to the foreman’s desk.”

“I can do that,” Blair agreed. As a TA, he’d dealt with more students than he could count who had tried to make it look like he’d lost their assignments when in fact they had never turned them in, so he knew all the tricks. There was the “Oops, I put it in the mailbox above yours” ploy, or the “I put it under your office door and the janitorial staff must have thrown it away” obfuscation, or the “It was here under this pile of papers all along!” sleight of hand…the options were endless. 

“Okay,” Jim said. “It sounds like you’ve thought of everything. The men do know that this is not a live-fire exercise, right?”

“Of course,” Kas said.

“Okay.” Jim looked over toward the truck. “What’s the signal?”

“Make a noise like an eagle,” Kas said sheepishly.

Jim raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry, I couldn’t think of anything! Solorio suggested it.”

After shaking his head in disgust, Jim said, “Everybody have everything? Angel, got your picnic blanket? Somebody has the monkey?” When everyone confirmed that they were ready, he glared at Kas one more time and made a noise like an eagle. One of the men over by the truck glanced at his watch, and they quickly but casually made their way down the trail toward the rendezvous point.

They reached Butt Rock before the five minute mark and crouched behind it. “They’re starting,” Angel said. Unlike Jim, he wasn’t reticent about narrating for the non-Sentinels. “George is asking them what the hell they think they’re doing…Christ, Solorio is really a dipshit; he’s making machine-gun noises and pretending to shoot people. Whoops, now one of the oil guys figured out what’s going on, and he’s pretending he’s armed, too…he just told Solorio he’s dead, and they’re debating about whether to go along with it…Carl’s saying they should just leave him there, but Dan says they can’t leave a man behind…”

Eventually, Angel announced that the truck had been successfully captured, and a moment later, Blair heard it coming down the road. The truck stopped just before the rock, and after an elaborate exchange of passwords and counter-signs, they were allowed into the truck. Kas took over the driving, and the rest of them piled into the back. 

“When we get back to the base,” Jim told them, “you three maintain possession of this truck until I tell you otherwise.”

“Yes, sir,” Dan said. “What about Solorio, sir? He’s dead.”

Jim glanced at him. “Blair used his shamanic powers to bring him back to life.”

Blair, having a sudden mental image of Jim presiding over a Dungeons and Dragons game, tried not to laugh.

“Can he really do that?” Carl asked. 

“No,” Blair said. “He was just resting.” 

“Stunned, maybe?” Dan asked. 

“Pining for the fjords,” Blair answered, wondering if it was possible that there were geeks in the Army.

“I could’ve sworn he’d run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible,” Dan said, straight-faced.

Jim cleared his throat, and they both fell silent, Dan looking guilty. Blair just barely managed not to comment on how they were evidently getting entirely too silly.

He wondered if the military had a specific rule about not doing the Dead Parrot sketch with your commanding officer’s Guide, or if it was covered under something more general. Excessive frivolity during a war game, maybe.

Except, although the soldiers didn’t know it, it wasn’t a game. There was _something_ serious going on, even if they didn’t know what it was yet. 

It only took them a few minutes to rattle down the dirt road to the compound. Two more Cyclops Oil trucks were there, one pulled up with obvious signs of haste in front of the infirmary. “Over there,” Angel said, pointing at it. “Kas, we need to--”

“I got it.”

There were also Cyclops workers milling around everywhere, at least twice as many as had been at the drill site with them. They couldn’t all be office workers—most were dressed in coveralls and hardhats, and they included several of the local workers from the village. Suddenly, Blair realized why the drill site had been so much quieter and cleaner than he had expected. It was a Potemkin village—Potemkin drill site, anyway. The rest of the crew and equipment must have been at the real site, wherever that was.

Kas parked in front of the infirmary, and Angel jumped out as soon as the truck was stopped. “Jim,” Blair said as the rest of them started getting out. “The site we were at must have been a fake.”

“No shit, Chief,” Jim said.

Leaving the soldiers to guard the truck, they hurried inside. One of the local workers—Blair thought his name was Eduardo—was laying on the exam table, the floor around it scattered with medical detritus, ignored by everyone as Angel tore into a rattled-looking Ed Rigel and two other Cyclops workers.

“—fucking stupid are you? Whatever the fuck you _hijos des putas_ are hiding down here, when somebody’s _bleeding to death_ it’s time to fucking stop hiding it!”

Blair had not seen Angel this thoroughly pissed off since the day they met, and he had all but forgotten the little Sentinel was capable of it. This time, though, he was fairly sure it wasn’t going to turn out to be a misunderstanding. Edging up to Kas, he said, “Uh, shouldn’t you be--” He gestured toward the patient.

“He’s dead,” Kas answered. “So we have some time.”

“Oh.”

Jim had gone over to the body, and now gestured to him. “Chief.”

Reluctantly, he went over there. There was a great deal of blood, and a dart sticking out of Eduardo’s lower back. 

Maybe the local tribe wasn’t quite as harmless as Rigel claimed. He focused on the dart, avoiding looking at the body or the pool of blood. “Okay, that looks typical of the tribes from this region—the pattern of the fletching is a little different from the ones they used in the village I visited, but that’s probably a regional variation. Probably done with a blowgun.”

Jim nodded. “I thought so, too. Bending closer and sniffing, he added, “I think they usually tip these things with curare, but I’m not smelling any. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think a Chopec warrior would normally shoot an unarmed man in the back. Any idea how we could tell if it’s a fake?”

“Uh…” Blair thought. “I’d look at how the shaft was smoothed—there should be distinctive marks if it was done with stone tools versus, say, sandpaper. But if it’s a really good fake, I don’t know.”

Pulling on a latex glove, Jim touched the end of the arrow and studied the shaft. He shook his head. “Looks pretty normal to me. Okay. Let’s go question some witnesses.”

The accounts they got of the actual incident were all consistent, from both the American workers and the locals. They had been working, as normal, when the indigenous people showed up. Their leader had, in Spanish, told the workers to stop drilling and go away. Frank, the foreman, had had one of the local workers explain that it was forbidden to be in the area without protective equipment, and they should leave for their own safety. The indigenous people had started banging their spears against the equipment and shouting. The workers had responded by threatening them with their tools. 

The leader gave what everyone said they had thought was a command to retreat, but the tribesmen had gone only as far as the edge of the clearing and started throwing rocks. The workers tried to shelter behind the equipment, but since the indigenous people had them surrounded, it didn’t work very well. When Eduardo yelped and started bleeding profusely, at first everyone had thought he’d been hit by a rock, but then they saw the dart. Frank had ordered most of them to stay as he loaded Eduardo into one of the trucks to take him back to the base, but they had not signed up to be shot at, and everyone had come back to the base.

The company men, however, maintained that Frank had been concerned only about making sure Eduardo got medical attention as quickly as possible, while one of the workers from the village who knew some English recounted radio conversations between Frank and Ed Rigel where they had discussed the importance of making sure the Sentinels didn’t find out what had happened. 

Jim intercepted Rigel and Frank coming out of the infirmary building. “We’ll be going out to the drill site—the real drill site—to continue the investigation,” he told them.

“Investigation?” Rigel yelped.

“Into the murder of one of your workers,” Jim clarified. “I’m sure you’re very eager to get to the bottom of it.”

“Oh! Oh, well, the victim of this very unfortunate event was one of the local workers. We’ll be contacting the Peruvian authorities, of course. You don’t really need to--”

“It’ll be some time before the local law enforcement can get here,” Jim said. “I’ll secure the scene, make sure no vital evidence is lost.”

“Um…well, I can send some of my men back out to guard the site,” Rigel said. “Yes, you and your men should stay here, make sure the natives don’t--”

“I’m not asking you,” Jim said. “I’m telling you what’s going to happen. I’ll leave my men here to stand guard. All Cyclops personnel will remain within the confines of this base, for your own protection. Is that clear?”

Rigel looked like he was about to protest, but something in Jim’s expression made him wise up. “Yes. It’s clear.”

They went back to their office, and Blair typed up the memo Kas had asked him to do, while Jim got some gear together. When they went back to the clinic building, most of the mess had been cleaned up and Eduardo was covered with a sheet. 

“The dart nicked his renal artery,” Angel reported. “I’ll send some samples to the lab—assuming there is a lab, somewhere—to be sure, but I don’t think it was poisoned. It wouldn’t have been fatal if it had hit a couple of millimeters to either side, or if it had gone just a little bit less deep. It probably wouldn’t have been fatal if he’d gotten immediate medical attention from someone who knew what the fuck they were doing, either.”

Jim nodded. “I’m going out to the real drill site. Kas, I want you to stay and make sure the men keep the Cyclops people on the base. Especially the higher-ups. I don’t want anybody fleeing jurisdiction before the local authorities get here.”

“Okay,” Kas said. “Are we contacting the local authorities, or…”

“Rigel says he’s going to. If he hasn’t, by the time I get back, we’ll decide then what to do.” Jim turned to face Angel. “There’s going to be a lot of evidence to examine out there, and it rains every morning. If we’re going to find everything….”

“But Kas….”

“I need Kas here,” Jim said. “If he doesn’t stay, then Lennox is in charge. Would you trust him?”

“You can’t make me go without my Guide,” Angel pointed out.

“No,” Jim said patiently. “I can’t make you.”

After a long moment, Angel said, “Oh.”

Jim pointed at Eduardo’s body. “Do you want to make sure the people responsible for that see justice, or do you want to stay here with Kas?”

About twenty minutes later, after Kas had put together Angel’s pack, they were setting out in an Army jeep up another rutted trail. Blair drove, stopping every now and then for Jim to get out and make sure they were following the route the Cyclops vehicles had taken that morning. When they reached the real drill site—twice the size of the fake one, with at least twice as much equipment—Jim took out the roll of maps he’d thrown in the pack right before they left. 

“Shit,” Blair said as he studied them. 

“What?” Angel asked from the back seat, peering over his shoulder. 

“We’re here.” Jim pointed at a spot on the map.

“Okay. What’s that line?”

“That line is separating the land covered by the Army’s 100-year lease from the protected area set aside for the Chopec,” Jim said. 

“And we’re….”

“On the wrong side,” Jim confirmed. 

After Jim briefed Angel on what he wanted him to do, they got out and started examining the site. Blair drew up a rough sketch of the site and began marking down the locations of evidence the Sentinels found. He was no artist, but he’d been on a few paleoanthropology expeditions, and the principles were the same: evidence, like artifacts, had to be understood as a network of relationships, not a collection of discrete objects. 

Jim also asked him to keep an eye on Angel, not that Blair had needed to be told. Angel seemed to be handling himself all right, though, as long as he stayed focused on the job he was doing. He was fairly good at finding evidence, but it was Jim who was able to pull it together into a coherent picture of what had happened. He eventually concluded that the physical evidence matched the story they’d gotten from the witnesses.

“Now can we go home?” Angel asked plaintively.

“Now we’re going to go look for our other witnesses,” Jim corrected him. 

“What other—oh, the, what did you call them? Chopec?”

“Yes,” Jim said. “They shouldn’t be too hard to track—it doesn’t look like they were trying not to be followed. You could stay here with the jeep.”

“All by myself? It’s getting dark!”

“Larry could stay with you,” Blair suggested. The little marmoset had been sleeping in his pouch on Blair’s chest while they worked, but he was starting to stir now.

“When will you be back?” Angel asked uncertainly.

“No idea.”

Eventually, Angel decided they had better stick together. Jim set off immediately down a trail—the merest notion of a trail, really, no different from any of dozens of animal tracks that wended through the jungle, stopping and turning for reasons that were not at all apparent to human eyes. Blair soon stopped even trying to figure out what tracks Jim was following, fully occupied with Guiding Jim, keeping Larry from screaming his head off, and reassuring Angel every time he said something like, “Was that a bear?” or “If he trips and breaks his leg, we’re all going to die.” 

When it grew dark enough that Jim needed a working link to stay on the trail he was following, Blair found himself trying to keep one hand on his Sentinel and open a container of maple syrup for Larry with the other. When Angel said, “Be careful! If you trip, you could crush him,” Blair abruptly shoved marmoset and syrup container at him and said, “Fine, _you_ do it!”

As soon as Angel took charge of Larry, they both settled down. Right, Kas had told them enough times that Angel worried less when he had something to do; Blair should have remembered. He looped one hand in Jim’s belt, so he couldn’t lose him, and they managed to walk another hour that way, until it was so dark Blair literally couldn’t see Jim in front of him. 

Jim stopped abruptly. 

“What, are we there?” Blair asked.

“No, but we’re only about an hour behind them now, and they’ll have stopped for the night. There’s no point sneaking up on them in the dark; we’ll camp here and catch up with them at first light.”

“Cozy,” Angel said. 

Blair heard Jim rummaging in his pack, and the crinkle of some kind of packaging. “Watch out, Angel,” he said, and a sickly green light blossomed in his hands. 

With his eyes adjusted to near-total darkness, Blair found the glow-stick was enough for him to get a decent idea of their surroundings. They were in a small spot that was clear of undergrowth, although he had a vague impression of trees soaring overhead. When everyone was still, Blair could hear water trickling not far off.

“I’ll refill the canteens,” Jim said. “You two get out something to eat.”

Jim left the light; he wasn’t the one who needed it. Blair eased off his own pack and sat down. After a moment, Angel sat too. “You okay?” Blair asked, digging through the packs for MREs. 

“Yeah,” Angel said. 

“Larry all right?”

“He’s asleep again.”

“I hope he doesn’t get lost while we’re doing this.” Blair supposed Larry would have to go back to the wild eventually, but they were miles from his home troop now. “Which one of these do you want? We’ve got--” He squinted at the printing on the packages. “I have no idea what we have.”

“I’m not really hungry,” Angel answered. He took the packets and read them. “Spaghetti…ravioli…Alfredo pasta, that can’t possibly be good….pork chop.” 

“I guess I’ll try the spaghetti,” Blair decided. They still had one canteen of water left, so he decided to go ahead and cook. Opening the packet, he tried to sort out how the little heater worked. Once he got it started, he picked another one at random and started heating it for Jim. “You should have something.”

Angel shrugged. 

By the time Jim got back, Blair was shamelessly arguing, “Kas’ll be mad at me if I let you starve to death.”

“I’m really not hungry. If I open another one of those things, it’ll just go to waste.”

“Let me see your pack a minute,” Jim said to Angel.

Looking suspicious, Angel handed over his pack. Jim dug out a package of snacks Kas must have packed for him, including a chunk of some kind of salami that was so garlicky Blair would have hesitated to offer it to a Sentinel. Jim must have known it was there. There was also something Blair couldn’t see but that must have been a note. After reading it, Angel agreed to eat some salami and crackers, along with the cheese spread and hard candy out of the MREs. 

“You want first watch or second?” Jim asked Angel as they were stowing the food wrappers back in their packs. 

“Oh. Um. First.”

“What about me?” Blair asked. 

“You’re not a Sentinel, Chief,” Jim reminded him. 

“Right, and in the Army only Sentinels keep watch,” Blair said. “That explains why so many of you drop over dead from sleep deprivation.”

“You’re not a soldier, either.”

“Neither am I,” Angel said helpfully.

“How hard can it possibly be? I hear anything strange, I wake you up.”

Eventually, Jim agreed that he could take third watch. Larry would be waking up about then anyway, and could help. Jim stuffed the glow stick inside one of the packs—there was no way to turn them off—and cleared a space on the ground for them to lie down. They had some foil emergency blankets in the packs, but Jim said they were noisy and impossible to fold back up once you opened them, so they just curled up on the ground together. The rain forest cooled down some at night, but Blair was still plenty warm with Jim at his back and Larry on his front. It had been a long, strange day, and he fell asleep without too much trouble.

He awoke some time later, in the pitch dark, with a vague sense that something was wrong. He felt for Larry—still there. Oh, it was Jim who was missing. 

“—curl up with Sandburg, then, I don’t care,” Jim was whispering. 

Muzzy-headed and half-asleep, Blair wasn’t sure whether to be offended that Jim was giving him away, or intrigued that a supposedly territorial Sentinel apparently had no objection to another Sentinel sleeping, in the literal sense, with his Guide. But it was chilly where Jim had been, and warm again once Angel lay down there, so he eventually decided not to worry about it and went back to sleep.

#

For a second, when he woke, Jim knew exactly where he was, but not when. He was sleeping on the ground in the jungle, and not far away someone was speaking Quechua—how long ago had the chopper crash been? Had leaving the Army to become a cop—let alone acquiring a really strange Guide—been a crazy dream?

But no, that was Blair’s voice, speaking Quechua, and now Angel was saying, “Jim? Are you awake? I think maybe you should wake up now, Jim.”

Blair was a few yards away, near the spring, with two—no, three—Chopec. Two men and a woman. Their voices sounded friendly, and there was no stink of fear or stress coming from Blair. He did smell the artificial lemon tea they put in MREs, along with pound cake and some kind of dried meat. Great, Blair had invited the suspects to breakfast. “Nice job with the watching, Chief!” he called, sitting up.

Blair bounced back into their little clearing, trailing his new friends. “Jim, Angel, this is Saywa, the Chopec Guide,” he said, indicating a woman with gray hair in braids down to her waist. He must have repeated the introductions in Quechua; Jim caught the words “Sentinel” and his and Angel’s names. “And these are Wayna and Atipaj.” He indicated the two men.

“Hi,” Angel said, waving. “Which one’s the Sentinel?”

“Neither,” Blair answered. “She’s back at their camp.” He translated the question, and all three Chopec laughed. “Anyway,” he said, “Saywa was waiting until I was on watch to come talk to me. Her Sentinel and the warriors are pretty suspicious of us—well, wouldn’t _you_ be?—so she thought us Guides ought to straighten things out before we involved you guys.” He squatted and dug through his pack, saying something else in Quechua. 

“And you straightened it all out?” Jim asked, slowly sitting up. 

“Mostly,” Blair answered. “They’re not too happy with the People of the Great Eye—that’s what they call Cyclops—as you can imagine. But they don’t mind the Flying People—that’s the Army—since you guys got rid of the drug gang before. So I explained that you guys are Sentinels of the Flying People, and we came down to check on the territory that we gave to the People of the Great Eye, and how we just found out that they weren’t honoring the agreement the Flying People had the Chopec, about where our territory ended and theirs started. I explained that now that we know, we’re going to do something about it, and that some of our warriors are keeping the People of the Great Eye in their village while we work things out.”

“Oh,” Jim said. That didn’t sound terribly straightened out to him.

“We negotiated a cease-fire,” Blair said. “We can go into the village without getting shot at. Isn’t that nice?” he finished, offering around almonds from their packs.

“Yeah, great, Chief.” He and Angel accepted some almonds and lemon tea. Saywa offered them some guinea pig jerky, which Jim accepted and Angel refused. Jim knew enough basic nouns in Quechua to grasp that Blair translated Angel’s, “Fuck no,” into something like, “He prefers not to eat meat in the mornings.”

As they ate, Saywa asked Blair something in which Jim identified the words, “Sentinel,” “sky,” and “Chopec Pass.” 

Looking puzzled, Blair said, “Uh, she wants to know if you’re the Sentinel who—I’m pretty sure she said ‘fell out of the sky’—in…someplace I don’t know.”

“The Army called it the Chopec Pass,” he said. “And yes.” “Yes” was one of the words he knew in Chopec, so he said it himself.

In Saywa’s answer, he couldn’t understand anything more than Incacha’s name, but he wasn’t too surprised when Blair translated, “She heard about you from Incacha—apparently he’s her uncle, or cousin, something, I’m a little vague on the kinship words. You’re an honorable man, and she’s sure you’ll get rid of the People of the Great Eye the way you did the drug lords. That’s good; I don’t think she really believed me when I said it before. And what’s this about falling out of the sky?”

“I told you about when I lived with the Chopec,” Jim said. “Our helicopter crashed. Uh…tell her I’m not completely sure that we can get rid of the People of the Great Eye. Our agreement with them allows them to use the territory for many more years, and we might not be able to break that agreement. But I promise that if they stay, we will make sure they abide by our agreement with the Chopec about where they can and can’t drill.”

“Okay,” Blair said. “I don’t remember how you say ‘abide’ in Quechua, but I’ll give it a try.” He managed what must have been a passable translation, with a lot of pauses and some clarifying questions from Saywa. Saywa looked satisfied at the end of it, anyway, so Jim hoped the key points had gotten through. 

“Have you talked about who killed Eduardo yet?” Jim asked when he had finished. 

Blair shook his head. “I was waiting for you to be awake for that part.”

Jim was a little relieved that apparently they needed him for _something_. He decided to wait until Saywa and the others had shown them to the camp before bringing it up. After they finished their little tea party, they set off. 

The tribe, about thirty men, women, and children, was camped less than a klick away. Their Sentinel, Chaska, came out to meet them. Jim was surprised, somehow, to see that the Sentinel and Guide were two middle-aged women. They were introduced to her and the chief, Yupanki, and had another round of refreshments before they were able to get down to business.

Talking through Blair as translator, Jim explained that he understood that they were angry that Cyclops was drilling on their land, and that he would help them get justice, but that a young man had been killed, and he deserved justice, too. 

As soon as Blair translated this, Chaska stood up quickly, calling out, “Utuya,” several times, followed by something along the lines of, “ _Come here right now!_ ”

A young man approached. “ _Yes, Mother_?”

What Chaska said next was beyond Jim’s limited Quechua, but Blair translated, “She’s telling him that the young man he shot has died. And that he’s an idiot, and they shouldn’t have let him come along on the, uh, raiding party—now he’s saying he’s very sorry and it was an accident. It was supposed to be a warning shot. And she’s saying that if anyone was going to fire a warning shot, it would have been one of the experienced warriors, and that he’s an idiot again.”

“That’s kind of what I thought,” Angel spoke up. “It didn’t look like it was supposed to be a fatal shot. And the Cyclops people are partly responsible.”

After Blair had explained that, Jim added, “Tell them, I understand, but since it was one of the local workers who was killed, it’s not my jurisdiction. The Peruvian authorities will have to decide what to do.”

“Okay. Man, that’s a lot of words I don’t know, but let me see if I can figure something out.”

After Blair and the three Chopec—the Sentinel, the Guide, the chief—talked for a while, the boy’s expression grew serious and he spoke at some length. Chaska nodded approvingly.

“They don’t know exactly what will happen, either,” Blair summarized. “Usually they handle their own matters of justice, but usually their warriors don’t kill unarmed men. Utuya says he’ll go to the village and face justice for what he did.”

Saywa spoke again, and Blair added, “And she says, she’ll go along to make sure that both Utuya and the People of the Great Eye face justice.”

Saywa and Chaska argued for several minutes. Blair didn’t translate, and Jim didn’t know many of the words they used, but he felt like he understood the gist anyway. Chaska was saying, “Oh no you aren’t!” and Sawya was responding, “Oh yes I am!” At one point, Jim thought they had settled on both Saywa and Chaska going, but then Yupanki objected, and all three of them went round and round for a while.

Finally, Blair made a suggestion. All three Chopec paused, considered, and reluctantly agreed.

“Okay!” Blair said, clapping his hands together. “Jim, you and Angel are going to take Saywa and Utuya back to the base. I’m going to stay here as a, um, honored guest.”

“Absolutely not.”

“I’ll be fine, Jim!”

“You’re not staying here by yourself.”

“I won’t be by myself. There’s all these other people here. Not to mention Larry.”

“ _Larry_ is not your Sentinel.”

“Well, Chaska’s going to be here. And you’re taking off to who-knows-where with her Guide. It’s really only fair if I stay here. Anyway, you’ll be back, what, tomorrow at the latest?”

While Jim continued to argue, Blair looked over at Saywa and said, “ _Sentinels, right_?” They both laughed. 

Eventually, Angel said unhappily, “Well, you know, I can’t take them back to the base because I’d probably get lost, and anyway I don’t know how to drive the jeep, but I guess I could stay here with Blair if that would help.”

Blair passed that suggestion on to the Chopec, and since everyone except Jim, and possibly Angel, seemed comfortable with it, he soon found himself heading back the way they had come, with Saywa, Utuya, and Atipaj.

#

Blair was at first unsure what to do—he had a million questions for Chaska, but he wasn’t exactly here as an anthropologist. Besides, the diplomatic situation was still a little dicey, and it was hard to do anthropology without being at least a little bit rude. 

When one of the children offered him a gourd full of some kind of sap-based drink, he woke up Larry to see if the marmoset wanted some of it. Larry proved just as fascinating to the Chopec children as he had been to the village ones—they saw marmosets all the time, but the Chopec didn’t really keep pets, so they hadn’t seen one up close. It turned out that teaching the children was one of the Chopec Guide’s main responsibilities, so when the kids started to get bored of playing with Larry, Blair started going through their lessons with them. The kids were thrilled to encounter such an ignorant grown-up, and were happy to fill him in on all sorts of details of their teaching stories, songs, and daily life.

When the mothers started calling the kids away to eat their lunch and do their chores, it occurred to Blair to wonder how Angel was doing. He went looking, but didn’t find him with the group of men who were re-tipping spears and crafting arrows, or with the other group of men who were talking about hunting. Just when Blair was starting to worry, he found Angel sitting with the old women, helping them pound yucca into flour.

Right, he probably should have looked there first, given Angel’s talent for attracting harems of grandmotherly types. Some of them spoke a little Spanish, and that and hand gestures seemed to be more than enough for Angel to charm the metaphorical pants off of them. A bit later, when they started having lunch, no one seemed remotely offended when Angel refused most of what he was offered; they just went looking for more delicacies to tempt him with.

After the meal, Angel’s new friends informed the men that they had better go start hunting if the tribe was going to put on an appropriate feast for the honored guests. It was strongly suggested that they would come back with wild boar, if they knew what was good for them. Angel declined an invitation to join the hunting party, and instead they went out with a group of women and children to gather fruits and tubers. Blair privately thought that Angel would be more trouble than he was worth, and the women would soon regret asking him along, but he proved to be surprisingly good at locating the plants they wanted, once he had been shown what to look for. The women were very pleased; Chopec Sentinels usually hunted with the men, even if they happened to be women, and Chaska was no exception.

They had been gathering food for a couple of hours, and Blair’s back was starting to ache from bending over to study the forest floor, when Angel suddenly stood up. “Fuck.”

“What?” Blair asked.

“There’s some kind of trouble, over where the others are—they’re yelling, and—shit, I think that’s the pig—somebody’s hurt.”

“Damn,” Blair said, trying to think what to do. He called over the nearest of the Chopec women, but she seemed to expect him to decide how to proceed—right, he was the Guide; he was supposed to know these things. He knew they had to act quickly—wild pigs were vicious, and if one of the hunters had been attacked, the injuries could be severe.

Angel said, “We ought to go help them—fuck, I need my bag first—but I don’t know if I can track them. Probably not. I flunked tracking, and that was a long time ago.”

Several others of the Chopec women had gathered by now. Blair asked them if they knew how to get to where the hunting party was. They said no, they could be anywhere. One of the women darkly observed that this would never have happened if Saywa had been here to bless the party before they set out.

“Okay, wait, I know,” Blair said. “Chaska can tell us how to get there. If you can hear them, she can hear us, right? Can somebody, I don’t know, get her attention?” He repeated the question in Quechua.

A girl of about twelve emerged out of the group of expectant women and called out, “ _Sentinel! Sentinel! Can you hear me_?”

The four of them carried on an awkward conversation, with Blair translating for Angel and Angel relaying Chaska’s comments, which he couldn’t understand, to the two of them who could. 

Gradually, they learned that one of the hunters, a youth named Sapaki, had been gored by the boar. The others had managed to chase it away, and he was still alive, but bleeding badly. 

“Where was he gored?” Angel asked. 

After Blair had translated and Angel relayed Chaska’s answer, Blair said, “In the leg. She says the blood is spurting.”

“That could be the femoral artery. That’s bad. Does anyone there know how to put on a tourniquet?”

It took a while to figure out, because Blair didn’t know the Quechua word for tourniquet, and wasn’t sure there was one. They started back toward the camp, to retrieve Angel’s first aid kit, as Blair tried to translate Angel’s explanation of how to apply one. It was complicated, especially when Angel got to the part about loosening the tourniquet every few minutes. Eventually, Angel switched to Spanish, which Chaska didn’t speak but a couple of the others in the hunting party did, which probably made things at least as confusing on their end of the conversation as they were on Blair and Angel’s. 

The girl, whose name was Tamaya, set out with them to catch up the hunting party, leading the way as Angel relayed Chaska’s directions on how to find them. Blair hoped she would be able to find their way back, because it was all he and Angel could do to keep up, let alone keep track of landmarks. The terrain was rough, but Angel didn’t complain about the pace, although he did occasionally have to stop to relay instructions to the people doing first aid at the accident scene. 

By the time they reached the hunting party, Sapaki was unconscious, and the rest of the Chopec were spattered with blood. Angel assessed the situation quickly, feeling the man’s heart and lungs and peering at the wound. “Press down on the wound with this,” he said, taking a handful of gauze out of his pack, “and loosen the tourniquet.”

Once that was done, he felt the pulse in Sapaki’s ankle. “Okay. Tighten it again. We should be able to save the leg, if I put stitches in it right now. It’s going to hurt like hell, and I have to work fast. I’m going to need at least three people to hold him down.”

Blair was pressed into service as surgical nurse, so precious time wouldn’t be wasted translating his instructions to one of the Chopec. Angel’s kit was small but surprisingly complete, and Blair laid out needles, surgical thread, forceps, and antiseptic wash on a relatively clean bit of cloth. “The artery is going to be the tricky part,” Angel said. “If I zone on it, get me out of it, fast, whatever you have to do. He’s lost about as much blood as I want to risk, without anything to transfuse with.”

“Okay,” Blair said. 

“Everybody ready?” Angel glanced around. “Go.”

Sapaki didn’t regain full consciousness as Angel worked, but he still screamed and struggled. Apart from one hairy moment when he got an arm free, though, the other warriors held him still. Angel worked furiously as he stitched the artery, very quickly as he stitched the muscle, and finally slowed as he stitched the skin. By that point Sapaki had grown too weak to struggle much, and only twitched and moaned gutturally. 

Finally, Angel gave the wound a final dousing with antiseptic and sat back on his heels, peeling off his latex gloves. “All right.” He took a few deep breaths. “Next he’ll be going into shock. We won’t be able to move him until that’s passed. What do we have that we can cover him with?”

Blair found one of the foil emergency blankets in Angel’s pack, and Tamaya helped him tuck it around the wounded man. “What now?”

“Now we ought to start him on a blood transfusion, or at least plasma, but there doesn’t seem to be a blood bank handy, and even I can’t do cross-matching without a lab, so the best we can do is give him fluids by mouth, once he wakes up enough to swallow. I don’t know what we have…broth would be good, something with iron. Do they put soup in MREs?”

It turned out they didn’t, at least not in any of the ones they had with them. But when Blair explained to Tamaya what they wanted, she briskly sent one of the warriors off to fetch water and some others to build a fire. “We can use this, but fresh would be better,” she explained, throwing a handful of dried meat into a leather pot. “Sentinel, is there game nearby?”

Chaska listened for a moment. “Viscacha, not too far off, and perhaps deer, although the boar may have frightened them away.”

Tamaya nodded solemnly. “A deer would be best, particularly the heart and liver, but several viscacha will do.” As Chaska turned to go, she bit her lip and called, “Be careful!”

Chaska turned back, the hint of a smile on her lips. “I’m always careful, little Guide.”

“Oh,” Blair said. “You’re a…” He probably should have realized that.

“I am Saywa’s apprentice,” she agreed. 

Belatedly, Blair realized it had been presumptuous of him to assume that the woman who said this wouldn’t have happened on Sawya’s watch was talking about _him_. “Um, who’s your Sentinel?” he asked, sick with certainty that she was going to say, “Utuya.”

But she shook her head. “We don’t have another Sentinel.”

“Oh.”

Tamaya bent to poke at the fire, which didn’t seem to need tending. “In the band led by Apuyurak, who is Yupanki’s brother, a boy was discovered to have the gifts of a Sentinel during his manhood trial,” she said quietly.

“Oh,” Blair said. “So will he come here, or….”

“Our bands will hunt together at the end of the season. It will be decided then. But Apuyurak’s band does not have a Sentinel or a Guide, and we have Chaska and Saywa.” After giving the pot of water and dried meat a vigorous stir, she added, “Perhaps he will come here for some time to train with Chaska.”

But after that, Blair understood, he would return to his own band…and take his Guide with him. “Is he…nice? Do you know him?”

“We last hunted with Apuyurak’s band some years ago. There were several boys; I took no notice of them. It was not known that Hakan would be a Sentinel.”

Right, so it wasn’t that she didn’t like him, but that she would probably be sent off to live with strangers, and a Sentinel she didn’t know. She wouldn’t be forced, exactly—not the way that Guides in the US were—but she would be expected to do her duty and go where she was needed most. 

“Perhaps I will know him, when we meet,” Tamaya added. “Saywa says that it was that way for her and Chaska. After they had spent one day together, they felt as if they had grown from one mother.”

“Yeah,” Blair said. “Yeah, it happens that way sometimes.”

#

When Solorio let him know that Major Ellison was on his way in, Kas decided to station himself over by the compound gate. Not that he was worried, exactly—surely if something was wrong, Jim would have said so on the radio—but he couldn’t quite remember when he had last been away from his Sentinel overnight, and Angel could not possibly be happy about it. 

Even though he wasn’t worried, exactly, when the jeep pulled in and Jim parked it, he couldn’t stop himself from going over and opening the back door. Inside were…two people he had never met, and _absolutely no Angel_. 

“What the _hell_ did you do with my Sentinel?” he demanded.

Instead of answering, Jim indicated the two people he’d brought with him. “This is Saywa, the Guide of the local tribe, and Utuya. He’s the one who…accidentally shot Eduardo. And Atipaj, one of the warriors.”

“Yeah, nice to meet you,” Kas said. “Angel?”

“He and Blair are still with the Chopec.”

“ _What_?”

“They’re fine,” Jim said. “The Chopec like us. It turns out Cyclops was drilling on their land; that’s why they didn’t want us to go out to the real drill site. Once we get Saywa in touch with the right authorities here, we’ll go back and get Blair and Angel.”

Belatedly, Kas remembered to give his own report. “Right. Uh, as far as I can tell, Rigel hasn’t contacted anybody except his bosses back in the States. The mayor of the village called the Peruvian national police. They aren’t here yet, but I suppose he can do something with the suspect until they get here.”

“We’ll need to contact somebody back in the States about the Cyclops situation,” Jim said. 

“Our CO?” Kas suggested. He had no idea who that was, but there had to be somebody they at least nominally reported to.

“I was thinking about that. It’s not exactly a military matter, since the illegal activity didn’t take place on the land they’re leasing from the Army,” Jim said. He said something to the two Chopec, in what Kas supposed must be Quechua, and they started toward the medical building. “And the Army might try to sweep it all under the rug with…everything else.”

“But since our mission here is classified, who can we tell?” Kas asked. 

“I have to look at the orders again. I think if we word it very carefully, we can notify somebody about what Cyclops is up to, without disclosing anything that’s classified. We’ll send a fax, so if necessary, we can prove exactly what we said and what we didn’t say.” He glanced back at the two Chopec. “We have to do something. Saywa knows Incacha, the shaman from the tribe I worked with down here before. They’re…expecting me to fix this.”

After a moment, Kas nodded. He knew Angel would agree—the subject of Cyclops’s illegal drilling might be a little abstract for him, but he very clearly held Cyclops responsible for Eduardo’s death. He’d want justice to be done, and for that, the whole story had to come out. “Okay. So who do we fax?”

“That’s where I’m not sure. I was hoping you would have an idea. Someone in Washington we can trust.”

“I’ll look at Angel’s address book.”

Before he could do that, though, they had to go into the infirmary, and as Kas had expected, Jim was not best pleased that he had released Eduardo’s body to the village priest for burial. But he did acknowledge that in the tropical heat, they didn’t have much choice, and Kas had typed up Angel’s autopsy notes, put samples of blood and other tissues in the refrigerator, and taken x-rays showing the position of the dart. It was the best they could do, under the circumstances.

Kas left Jim trying to sort out what to do with the Chopec and went into his and Angel’s quarters. 

Angel’s address book, fortunately, was a mess. He tended to just shove business cards into the pages rather than write things down, and as a result, they had fax numbers for a lot of people they never really had reason to fax. Finally, he settled on a Sentinel-Guide pair who worked for the FBI. 

By the time he finished, Jim and the Chopec contingent were in Jim’s office, meeting with the mayor of the village. The Guide, fortunately, spoke a little Spanish, and she and the mayor were able to agree that Utuya would be turned over to the mayor’s custody—it seemed safer all around to have him out of reach of Rigel and the other Cyclops employees—and Saywa would stay to await the arrival of the Peruvian authorities, as a representative of her people. 

“I think I should take over things here,” Jim told Kas. “And she says Atipaj can take you back to where the others are.”

Kas wasn’t about to argue with that—things here were getting way too political for a mere sergeant—even one who by accident of fate and a nursing degree had become a lieutenant—and more importantly, the sooner he was back with Angel, the better. 

#

“Angel? You okay, man?” The little Sentinel was sitting with his back against a tree, his eyes half-closed and his expression blank. Blair thought he might be zoned or something, and wondered what he ought to do to bring him out of it. 

But Angel glanced up briefly. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, and half-closed his eyes again.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to get Kas to send more antibiotics.”

“What, with the Bond? You can do that?” He had heard of Sentinels and Guides using the Bond to communicate across distance—but not, of course, ones from industrialized societies.

“Not really. He says he can sometimes get an idea of how I’m feeling. A couple of times when I forgot my lunch he decided to bring me food for no apparent reason.”

“Huh.”

“Anyway, it’s not like it can hurt.” After sitting in silence for a few more minutes, he got up and went to check on Sapaki. It had been a few hours since Angel’s impromptu surgery, and they had gotten two pots of broth into him, mixed with antibiotics and pain pills that Angel had crushed. “His blood pressure’s up a little.”

“Is he well enough to be moved yet?” Chaska had said that it would be unwise to stay out here all night; a small group like this wasn’t completely safe from wild animals. “We can’t wait more than a couple of hours and get back to camp before dark.”

Angel nodded. “Yeah. If the stretcher’s ready, we can go. Better to have time to take it slow.”

Blair relayed that to the Chopec, who efficiently packed up their gear, put out the fire, and loaded Sapaki onto the stretcher they had made.

The hike back to camp was much, much slower than their headlong race to the hunting party. The trail back was mostly downhill, which while carrying a stretcher was no advantage. Several times after maneuvering through particularly tricky bits of terrain, Sapaki woke enough to cry out in pain, and as soon as they could find a stretch of level ground, they had to stop and wait until Angel was satisfied that Sapaki was stable enough to go on. 

When they neared the camp, Angel said, “Oh, hey!”

“What?”

“Kas is there.”

“Kas? What about Jim?” 

“I don’t hear him.”

Blair had thought that it might be a day or two before Jim came back, since there would doubtless be a lot going on back at the base, but what did it mean that Kas was here without him? Or maybe he was there, and just wasn’t saying anything. 

He asked Chaska, too, but she just shook her head. “Saywa is not there, either.”

“I hope they’re all right,” Blair muttered.

“Saywa is well.”

Of course, she could tell. Apparently he was the only one here who couldn’t communicate through the Bond. 

#

“Hi, Kas!” Angel called out cheerily as the party made their way into camp.

Kas barely managed to restrain himself from replying, “Where the _fuck_ have you been?” Some of the Chopec had tried to explain, but since the only common language they had was pantomime and a little broken Spanish—they spoke little, and he understood less—all he had gotten was that the explanation for Angel’s absence involved a pig and someone named Sapaki.

But if Sapaki was the person on the stretcher that Angel was walking beside, then the thrusting gestures the Chopec women had made must have represented some kind of animal attack.

Well, that was more logical than what Kas had been imagining.

So instead of demanding to know where Angel had been, Kas asked, “Is he all right?”

Angel nodded. “Stable. We’re going to need more antibiotics. And morphine would be nice.”

“I brought another kit.” When he’d been throwing together his gear, some impulse had made him cram in some extra first aid supplies.

“Great.”

Once they had the patient settled, Angel filled him in on his day, which Kas gathered had been fairly eventful. As unfortunate as the Chopec hunter’s injury was, it had at least served to keep Angel from particularly noticing that being out in the jungle without Kas might be something to be upset about. 

After he was sure Angel was all right, Kas remembered to check on the rest of the party. He found Blair and the monkey talking with a Chopec girl. Well, Blair was talking to her. Larry was climbing on his head. “You all right, Blair?”

Blair glanced up and said something to the girl. Then to Kas he said, “Yeah. What’s going on? Where’s Jim?”

“Back at the base. Saywa and the suspect stayed, too. Waiting for the authorities. He’s okay. We’re clear to head back, but I’m not sure if Angel’s going to want to leave until he’s sure that guy’s going to be all right.”

Blair nodded and said something to the Chopec girl, who looked relieved. “Good,” Blair said. “Saywa’s their healer—Tamaya’s her apprentice, but she was pretty nervous about having to take care of Sapaki on her own.”

Kas nodded. “Tomorrow we can hike back down to the Jeep and use the radio to check in with Jim.”

“That would be good,” Blair agreed. “I don’t think the Chopec will mind if we stick around, but I’ll run it by them and make sure.” He spoke again to the Chopec girl, and she replied and went off, still holding Larry.

Moments later, she returned with an older woman of regal bearing. The tribe’s Sentinel, Kas guessed. Blair confirmed his guess when he introduced them. 

Before Blair could ask his question, though, the woman—Chaska—spoke at some length. 

When she finished Blair said, “Oh, man. Let me--” He said something else in Quechua, in which Kas caught the words “Kas” and “Guide,” then turned to Kas and said, “She says, uh, Saywa suggested that she bring the rest of the tribe to the base. They can camp outside the perimeter. They’re asking us if that’s OK.”

Kas frowned. “She didn’t say anything about that to Jim.”

“No, they’re asking me because--”

“You’re the Guide,” Kas groaned.

“Right, and Guides handle negotiations between tribes. Only I explained that I’m not a Guide of the Flying People—that’s the Army—so she has to ask you.”

“Oh, great.” Kas sighed. Hadn’t he come here, while Jim stayed, to get away from the politics?

The Chopec Sentinel asked another question in Quechua. Blair shook his head and answered, then explained to Kas, “Now she’s wondering if it’s customary among the Flying People for Guides to be warriors and Sentinels healers. I said no.”

“Right, it’s not. Okay, tell her we think that’s a good idea,” Kas decided. “And we’ll check with Jim when we call him tomorrow.”

Blair relayed that, then explained that they would probably have to delay leaving until Sapaki was stronger. 

With that decided, Kas returned to Angel’s side. The Chopec were preparing some kind of a feast, the centerpiece of which was a large, skinned carcass. 

“That doesn’t look like a pig,” Kas observed. It smelled good, though, whatever it was.

“No, the pig got away. That’s a deer,” Angel explained. “I hope it’s ready soon. I’m kinda hungry.”

Kas was glad to hear that. 

The next day, Jim agreed that bringing the Chopec to the base was a good plan. They stayed camped there for five more days, taking it in turns with Tamaya and Blair to monitor Sapaki’s condition. Once his blood pressure stabilized, infection set in. Tamaya, relayed through Blair, said that she expected him to die, but the antibiotics and fever reducers kept the infection from raging out of control. The Chopec Guide was very impressed with their medicines, but her admiration faded when she learned that they couldn’t show her how to make the medicines, and in fact had no idea themselves how they were made. The tribe’s stock of medicines was much smaller, but Saywa knew all about them, from gathering the ingredients to administering them to the patient. Tamaya clearly thought using medicines one didn’t really understand was cheating. 

But, cheating or not, the man did begin to recover. Once he was well enough to sit up and to eat solid food, Angel agreed that he was well enough to be moved. 

Hiking down to the clearing where Kas had left their Jeep took the better part of a day. Even if Sapaki hadn’t needed to be carried on a stretcher, they’d have made slow progress since the tribe included old people and infants. They decided to camp there for the night and continue on to the base the next day. 

Kas radioed the base and got Corporal Lennox. 

“Lieutenant Temas here. What’s your status there?”

Lennox’s reply was thick with static, but Kas caught the word “quiet.”

“Corporal, your last transmission was garbled. We’re expecting to come in tomorrow afternoon. Do you need us sooner?”

There was just as much static in the next reply, but since it was, “Negative, Lieutenant,” Kas was able to understand it.

“All right. Tell Major Ellison to leave the light on for us.”

“Sir?”

“Over and out, Lieutenant.”

The slow pace of their hike had given the Chopec plenty of time to hunt and gather along the way, so even though they had a crate of MREs in the Jeep, the Chopec treated them to dinner again. This time the main course was roasted fowl—pigeons and some kind of ducks, Kas thought—with roasted tubers and some kind of salad. 

Sitting down next to Blair and Angel to eat, Kas remarked that he was surprised how well they’d been eating while guests of the Chopec. 

“Hunting and gathering tribes usually have better diets than agriculturalists,” Blair said. “More calories, more protein, more vitamins, everything. And the ratio of calories taken into calories expended is great—non-industrial farmers have to work twice as hard for less food. The only advantage to agriculture is that you can store a surplus for times of famine.”

“That’s a pretty big advantage,” Kas observed.

“Well, yeah. That’s why agriculture has taken over most of the world. Well, that and beer. Only settled people can grow grain and make beer.”

“A beer would be nice around now,” Angel said.

“And there you have the history of Western civilization,” Blair concluded. “Have another potato.”

#

“What the hell?” Angel muttered.

“What?” Blair asked. He and Angel were walking along behind the Jeep, while Kas drove and Sapaki rode in the back. Some of the old people and women with babies took turns riding in front next to Kas, allowing them to keep to a fast walking pace.

“There are a bunch of people down by the gate,” Angel said. “People and vehicles.”

“The Peruvian police, maybe?”

“There are a lot of them,” Angel said worriedly. He jogged up to the side of the Jeep and spoke to Kas. 

Blair saw Kas raise the radio to his mouth. After a moment, Angel stopped and let the Jeep pull ahead, and Blair catch up to him. “Jim says they’ll meet us at the gate, and to remind you that everything’s still classified.”

“Okay,” Blair said. “And?”

“And it’s irritating as fuck the way he won’t tell anyone else what’s going on,” Angel groused. “He sure doesn’t look like he’d have such a flair for the dramatic.”

After another hour or so of hiking, the compound came into view. There were about a half-dozen vehicles clustered around the gate, mostly big white SUVs. Some of them had what looked like radio towers on top. 

“That’s fucking weird,” Angel said. “The side of that van says, ‘ _Television Nacional del Peru_.’”

“They’re probably here to cover the, you know, the oil thing,” Blair suggested. “Or the murder.”

“One of the others says British Broadcasting Corporation,” Angel told him. “None of the others are facing the right way for me to read what’s on the doors, but I think I see the CNN logo.”

“Slow news cycle?” Blair essayed.

But when they got close, the reporters surged toward them. Blair heard one say, “That’s him? That’s gotta be him. The short one with the hair.”

Before the crowd could reach them, the Chopec warriors took up defensive positions around the Jeep, brandishing spears and bows. Through a loudspeaker, someone said, “Move to the side of the road. If you impede the progress of that official United States Army Vehicle, you may be subject to criminal charges. Move to the side of the road.” The same order was then repeated in Spanish. 

Angel looked around anxiously, but Blair said, “I think he’s talking to them,” gesturing at the reporters. The crowd moved to the sides, bristling with cameras, both still and video. As they approached the CNN crew, Blair heard a woman announcer say, “For those who are just joining us, the Cascade Four have been located here in the remote Lareto province of Peru. Passing behind me now you can see Blair Sandburg, escorted by what appear to be members of the nearby indigenous tribe. With his background in anthropology…”

Clearly this was what Jim had been warning them about. Something more direct would have been appreciated, Blair thought. Classified, right. He got closer to the Jeep, keeping a particularly menacing-looking Chopec man between himself and the crowd.

When the gates opened, all four of the enlisted soldiers came out to wave the reporters back with their guns. Once they were inside, Solorio and McCaughy slammed the gates behind them, and the crowd descended against the gate, yelling, “Blair! Blair! Mister Sandburg, would you care to comment on…”

Jim had been keeping back from the fence, but met up with them once they were a few yards in. “The Chopec will have to set up in here if they don’t want to be harassed,” he explained. “Over there, maybe?” He gestured. “Come to my office when you’re ready, and I’ll fill you in.”

Blair relayed Jim’s instructions to the Chopec. Angel wanted to install Sapaki in the infirmary, but the Chopec didn’t think much of that idea, and eventually Angel had to admit that given he’d been successfully treating Sapaki in the jungle for several days, continuing to treat him in a campsite thirty yards from the infirmary was doable. Finally, the three of them left the Chopec to get settled and went to meet Jim.

“Right, well, you saw the welcoming committee outside,” Jim said. 

“Yeah, what the fuck is that about?” Angel asked.

“As far as I can tell, that email gained the attention of pretty much the entire world,” Jim said. “While we’ve been incommunicado down here, Sandburg’s turned into a _cause célèbre_. When the _Policia Nacional_ turned up, they knew who we were. I think it must have been one of them that leaked it to the press—your friend at the FBI says he didn’t, by the way,” Jim added to Kas. “None of the US authorities have shown up yet, and all the Army is saying so far is that we’re to hold tight and await further orders, and to remember that everything about our situation is classified.”

“So what do we do?” Blair asked.

“Keep our mouths shut and await further orders,” Jim said with a shrug. “Keep a guard on the gate—we’ve told them that they’ll be taken into custody if they make it over the fence, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying. Try to stay out of sight.”

Thinking, Blair said, “We can’t talk to them because of our orders. But maybe we had better make sure put in an appearance every now and then, so they don’t give up and go away.” He wasn’t sure exactly how they could use the reporters to their advantage, but if they Army didn’t want anyone to know where they were, Blair was pretty sure he _did_ want as many people as possible to know.

Jim looked uncertain, but Kas said, “I think he’s right. If we haven’t been ordered to stay out of sight, we can’t really be blamed for going about our normal business.”

Angel nodded. “Yeah, the Army can’t disappear us again the whole world is watching.”

With the rest of them in agreement, Jim had to concede the point. The other two left, Angel talking rapturously about showers. Once they had left, Jim said, “Chief, Christ,” and pulled him into his arms. He pressed his nose against the nape of Blair’s neck and inhaled deeply.

“Don’t do that, man, I haven’t showered in a week.” He wasn’t sure whether to take a cold one here, or brave the reporters and the Cyclops personnel to use the heated showers at the gym.

“Don’t care,” Jim said. “Love you.”

“You, too.” He hadn’t quite realized how much he had missed Jim until he saw him again. 

Rubbing up against his hip, Jim said, “The others are busy. You want to--”

“Yeah,” Blair said, pulling him toward their bedroom, the thought of showering momentarily forgotten.

#

The next day, after taking Blair’s statement, one of the agents from the Peruvian national police slipped him a copy of the _International Herald-Tribune_ with the banner headline, _Tortured Guide Located in Remote Peru Village: No Comment, say US Guide Authorities_. 

After a brief opening paragraph explaining how an “unnamed source” had disclosed the whereabouts of Blair Sandburg and his Sentinel and friends, the article went on to summarize what had been happening, from the perspective of the rest of the world, since their capture.

Within a day or two after Angel sent out Blair’s email, it had been sent to all of the major US news outlets, and the international ones weren’t far behind. Choice passages were quoted in the article, and reminded the reader that the full text was available on the Herald-Tribune’s website. There was also a little paragraph about Blair’s published academic work, so at least he wasn’t world-famous _exclusively_ as a torture victim. 

G-TAC, apparently, was saying that Lorelei Marks had kidnapped him from the library that day all on her own, and she had been dismissed from her position and was being held without bail awaiting trial. About the rest of it, they said only, “Guide Sandburg’s training is being investigated for possible irregularities.”

All the paper had from the Army was the cover story: the two Sentinels and their Guides had been recalled to active duty in the vital interests of national security, and their location and duties were classified. 

On one of the inside pages was a picture of Naomi, standing between Simon Banks and Eli Stoddard in front of the G-TAC building. The caption explained that it was a candlelight vigil held two nights after the disappearance of the Cascade Four, and that “Naomi Sandburg, Blair’s mother” had been staging a sit-in there ever since, frequently accompanied by members of the Cascade PD’s major crimes unit, the Rainer University anthropology department, and Cascade General Hospital. There was another picture of her sitting in a folding chair in front of a small dome tent, alone, but the caption noted that on weekend afternoons the protest crowd was estimated at three hundred.

A sidebar article described public reaction to the scandal. As Angel had suggested during their strategy session back in Cascade, Sentinels across the country were furious, but Blair was surprised to see that the families of some Guides had spoken out. “My daughter is a Guide with the Navy,” one mother was quoted. “She’s only able to call a couple of times a year. With all of this going on, how can I know if she’s safe?” Naomi was pictured again, but not quoted—probably she hadn’t said anything printable. 

The Peruvian feds, or someone, must have also let slip to the crowd of reporters outside that they had no idea what was going on, because the next time Blair walked past the gates—he wanted to check on Larry, who was hanging out with Tamaya these days—they took a break from shouting questions at him to push more newspapers through the chain link. 

The Chopec had, of course, figured out that something was up, and when Tamaya asked what was going on, Blair had to tell her. At first, she didn’t believe that he meant what he was saying. She ran to get Saywa, and Blair had to go over it again in Spanish. 

“The Flying People treat their Guides this way?” Saywa asked.

Blair nodded. 

He didn’t know the words Saywa used next, but he was fairly sure they were obscene. “Monster,” she finished. “How do your Sentinels allow such a thing?”

“It’s not Jim’s fault,” Blair said. “He’s been trying to protect me.”

“I must talk to Chaska and Yupanki.” Bowing to him, Saywa left. 

“What will you do?” Tamaya asked him, her arms tightening around Larry, who squealed and jumped over to Blair’s head.

“I don’t know,” he answered, prying the marmoset’s sticky fingers out of his hair. “We’ll have to see what the Army—the chiefs of the Flying People—tell us.”

When he went back to Jim’s office, though, Blair asked him the same question. “Having half the world camped out on the front porch might keep the Army from making us disappear again, but it’s also going to make it pretty hard for us to disappear ourselves to someplace that won’t extradite us.”

“I don’t know, Chief,” Jim said. “I’m kind of focused on the case right now—the Chopec are counting on us to get Cyclops taken care of.”

In other words, he was focusing on someone else’s problem to avoid theirs. Blair couldn’t exactly blame him, but it wasn’t helpful. 

#

“—one of the reporters to give us some Nutella.”

“What about the reporters?” Kas asked, looking up from the report he was reading. Trying to get caught up on the paperwork that had been neglected while they were out in the jungle, he hadn’t been paying much attention to what Angel was nattering on about. “We aren’t supposed to talk to the reporters,” Kas reminded him. “About Nutella or anything else.”

“Maybe we could ask them in mime.”

“Okay, you figure out how to mime hazelnut spread and get back to me.”

Angel was still thinking about it when the phone rang. He picked it up before Kas could, saying, “Infirmary. Oh, hi Blair. What’s—about what? Okay. Yeah, he’s here. We’ll be right there.” He hung up. “Chaska and Saywa want to talk to us. All four of us. They’re over at Jim and Blair’s place.”

“What about?” Kas asked, getting up.

“I asked; he doesn’t know. Hey, maybe _they_ could ask the reporters for Nutella for us.”

“There’s an idea,” Kas said. 

“You’re forgetting I know what that means,” Angel said.

“It’s certainly something to keep in mind.”

“Oh, fuck you.” Angel bumped him with his shoulder.

They composed themselves and went into the base commander’s office. Saywa and Chaska were there, looking dubiously at cups of coffee that Jim had just given them. 

“Hi,” Angel said to the two women. “What can we do for you?”

Blair translated that, then Chaska’s reply. “She says, uh, they hope to do something for us.”

They looked around at each other. “Okay,” Jim finally said. “What?”

Saywa spoke at length, looking at each of them in turn, and then Chaska added a brief remark. 

“She says, uh—and this is really an honor, so don’t yell or anything, okay, Angel?” Blair asked. Angel nodded and he continued, “She says they’d like to invite us to be adopted into the tribe. And, you know, stay with them. They heard about what happened back in Cascade, and—well, basically they’re offering us political asylum.”

Next to Kas, Angel briefly looked horrified, but quickly regained a neutral expression. “ _Gracias, senoras_. You’re very kind. We’ll, um, we’ll have to think about it.”

Jim nodded. “Yeah. What he said. We’ll have to talk it over.” Kas could tell that he was giving the idea serious consideration. 

Blair repeated that to the two Chopec women, who seemed to understand that they wouldn’t make such a decision on the spur of the moment. Saywa spoke, and Blair translated, “She says, they and the tribe’s elders met for most of the day to talk about making us this offer, so they understand that we’ll need some time to discuss it. And a lot of stuff about how they had no idea how barbaric the city people were.” Blair turned back to the two women and spoke at length in Quechua.

When he paused for breath, Kas said, “Can you ask them if it’s a package deal? I mean, if you guys want to stay and we don’t….”

Blair nodded and asked. “They’d be happy to have all of us or any of us,” he reported back. 

After a few more pleasantries, the two women left. Angel sagged against Kas’s side. “We don’t have to, do we? I really want to go home.”

“I know,” Kas told him. 

“And even if they make us stay in the Army, at least the Army has electricity.”

Blair and Jim, however, were having their own conversation. “Well, it’s an option we didn’t have before,” Blair said. 

Jim nodded. “It wouldn’t be quite as simple as them asking and us saying yes, but at this point, the Peruvian authorities are scrambling for a way to come out of this situation looking good. I would bet that if the Chopec made granting us asylum part of the package of what they want in return for the whole Cyclops mess, it would fly.”

“Could you deal with it?” Blair asked. “It’s pretty different from what you’re used to.”

Jim made a face and said, “I like it better than the international fugitives option, and way better than letting G-TAC get their hands on you again.”

“Oh,” Angel said, glancing up at Kas. “I kind of forgot about G-TAC.” He slipped his hand into Kas’s. “Maybe we should think about staying.”

“Why don’t we wait and see what their next move is,” Kas suggested. Angel had had a fairly good time on his visit with the Chopec, but he’d be absolutely miserable living with them. He also had a hard time believing that, after leaving them alone for all these years, G-TAC could be any real danger to him now.

“Yeah,” said Blair. “We have choices; that’s the important thing.” Glancing up at Jim, he added, “We can make a decision once we have a better idea what the other ones are.”

#

A little while later, Blair headed out for a walk, deliberately starting out in the opposite direction from the entry gate and its accompanying gaggle of reporters. He had some thinking to do. 

Saywa and Chaska’s offer was generous—more than generous. In a hunter-gatherer society, everyone’s contribution was vital, but the Chopec would have reason to doubt that the four of them would be able to pull their own weight. They were, as Angel had said, very kind.

But while Blair had studied tribal cultures all of his adult life, actually becoming a _member_ of one was something else entirely. A few months ago, some semblance of the life he’d planned for himself had seemed within his grasp—he’d finish his degree at Rainier, then teach and research part time. It wasn’t exactly what he wanted, but it was a lot closer than living in the Amazon rain forest would be.

He might be able to be a part-time police Guide and a part-time scholar, but he couldn’t be a part-time tribal Guide. He’d undoubtedly be able to gather reams of material on Chopec life, but he wouldn’t have time to write any of it up, much less publish it, without being a drain on the group’s resources. And the Chopec were an illiterate culture—he’d likely hardly ever have anything to read at all, much less the resources of a university library. 

On the other hand, it was an undeniably better option than being chained to a wall having the shit beaten out of him. He didn’t know if the life he’d hoped to have back in Cascade was even possible anymore. On the other hand, he didn’t know it wasn’t. 

Thanks to the Chopec, he now had a choice—but it wasn’t a choice he actually wanted.

“Blair?”

“Hm? Oh, hi, Tamaya.” Without his noticing, he’d circled around to the Chopec camp. 

“Saywa says that they have asked you and your Sentinel to join us,” she said, falling into step beside him.

Blair nodded. “She did. We, uh, we really appreciate it.” Wanting to avoid the logical next question—whether they would be accepting or not—he asked, “If we did, what would that mean for your situation, with….” He couldn’t remember the name of the Sentinel in the other band.

“Hakan?” She shook her head. “I do not know. But I would not have spoken of my troubles if I knew of yours. Our Guides are respected; I have nothing to fear from Hakan.”

Great, now he was an object lesson in appreciating your blessings. He thought about pointing out that he had nothing to fear from Jim, either, but instead said, “How’s Larry? Thanks for taking care of him.”

“Larry does well. He is a lively companion.” They walked a little longer in silence, until Tamaya said, “He calls to his own tribe outside the fence, but he remains with us. Do you think he will go to join them, later?”

“I don’t know,” Blair admitted. “We’ll have to wait and see what he decides to do, I guess.”

Tamaya nodded solemnly.

#

The next day, Jim was hunkered down in his office trying to avoid the press, the Chopec, and the Cyclops people when McCaughey came in with a very large bag. “Mail for you, sir.”

Jim looked again at the bag. “What, all of it?”

“There’s another sack at the barracks, sir. I couldn’t find a wheelbarrow, so I’ll have to go back for it.”

Picking a letter out of the sack at random, Jim read the address: BLAIR SANDBURG, ARMY BASE, PERU. “Thanks,” he told McCaughey. “Dismissed.”

He and Blair each took out a handful of envelopes. “I wonder if any of these are actually from people we know,” Blair said. 

“I don’t know,” Jim said. “Maybe.”

They decided to sort through the bag first, making piles for mail from strangers and from news agencies. Before long, Blair started another pile for letters from foreign governments. “Maybe we should get Kas and Angel to help with this,” he suggested. “Some of these are for all of us.” He held up a letter addressed to “Cascade Four—Peru.”

“I’ll call them when I’m done with this handful,” Jim agreed. He flipped through a stack of envelopes, examining the return addresses for anything even vaguely familiar. 

Before he finished, though, Angel barged into the room, holding aloft a slip of thin yellow paper and saying, “You will never in a million years guess what I just got.”

“You won the Publisher’s Clearinghouse sweepstakes?” Blair suggested. 

Coming into the office on Angel’s heels, Kas said, “Just tell them—holy shit, what’s all that?”

“Fan mail,” Blair said. 

Jim wanted to argue, but he supposed that was pretty accurate.

“What did you get?” Blair asked.

“A personal telegram from Fidel Castro inviting us back to Cuba as political refugees.”

“Seriously?” Blair asked, getting up to look at it. “Are you going to go?”

“Of course not. God only knows what they do with Sentinels there.”

Jim privately thought that it would be very difficult for whatever it was to be worse than what they did to Guides in the US, but didn’t argue. “I wonder if—Chief, where did you put that one from Spain?”

“It’s the far-right pile—no, your right—wait, do you think--?”

The state department of Spain was considerably more diplomatic than Castro had been, but they also pronounced themselves appalled by the actions of the United States and extended an offer of asylum. They all set to digging through the bag of mail, and by the time they had sorted both bags, found similar offers from a dozen other countries, including Australia, South Africa, and the Netherlands. 

They also found, amid hundreds of letters from strangers, ones from Simon, Eli Stoddard, Naomi, and Jim’s brother. Angel trotted back to the infirmary for the rest of their own mail, which was much less than his and Blair’s, but seemed to consist mostly of letters from people he had at least met—all of the “Cascade Four” letters had been brought to him and Blair.

“Hey, did Simon say anything about my mom in his letter?” Blair asked as they were reading their personal mail.

“No,” Jim answered. “He just says he hopes we’re okay, they miss us down at Major Crimes, that kind of thing. Why?”

“Well, Naomi says, ‘Your Captain Banks is really not so bad for a pig.’ I don’t know, I kinda wondered if there was something going on there.”

“I’m sure they just talked at the protest,” Jim said. 

Angel spoke up, “Casey—he’s my department head—says she’s a ‘fascinating lady.’”

Blair mouthed the words _fascinating lady_. “I dunno, is that subtext?”

Angel shrugged. “‘I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Sandburg at the rally—she certainly is a fascinating lady.’ No idea. His wife died about a year ago.” He dropped that letter and picked up another one. “Robert and Jean-Vincent say the UN are considering sanctions.”

For a second, Jim thought he meant against Blair’s mother, before he realized they were back to politics. 

“Did we get an offer from France?” Kas asked.

“Yeah,” Blair told him.

“What do you think about France?” Kas asked Angel. 

“I guess it would be okay,” Angel said. 

“But you really want to go home to Cascade,” Kas guessed.

“Yeah,” Angel admitted. “If we can.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do. If we can.”

“What do you think?” Jim asked Blair.

“I don’t know. Going back to Spain would be good. I already know everybody at the University of Barcelona. Or I’ve kind of always wanted to go to Australia—they’ve got, you know, cities and everything, but the indigenous culture there is really fascinating, too. I’m not sure I’d want to live in South Africa, honestly, but do you think if we acted like we were considering it, we might get to meet Nelson Mandela? Dunno. Where do you want to go?”

Jim noted that “Back to Cascade” didn’t appear anywhere on Blair’s list. Well, naturally. He’d only lived there for a few years as a student, and then again for a couple of very unpleasant years as a Guide. “They speak English in Australia,” he pointed out. “That might come in handy. But I could do Spain, if that’s what you want.” He thought longingly of his loft, his job, his familiar haunts…but he wasn’t about to start whining that he wanted to go home. He wasn’t _Angel_ , for Christ’s sake.

Kas picked up another letter. “Christof—he’s our friend at the FBI—says the buzz in Washington is that they’re putting together a task force to re-evaluate Sentinel-Guide policy. The President has suggested, ‘apparently with complete seriousness,’ Chris says, that they consider putting some Sentinels and Guides on it this time.”

“What a novel idea,” Blair observed.

“I don’t know, they probably won’t have much trouble finding someone to tell them what they want to hear,” Kas answered. “We’re not all wild-eyed radicals.”

Jim had to agree. If G-TAC could get someone like Michelle Masden to work for them, the federal government ought to be able to tap somebody who wouldn’t rock the boat.

#

The influx of mail kept up over the next few days. The second wave was heavy on letters from reporters and TV networks; Blair was also offered three book deals and an opportunity to sell the movie rights to his life. Along with hundreds of letters and cards expressing support, there were also a handful of screeds suggesting he was a liar and had deserved everything he got. Blair wasn’t too troubled by any of those, though. The ones that got to him were the letters from Guides, from parents and families of Guides, and—worst of all—from teenagers who had been identified as Guides and expected to be drafted in the next few years.

_I know I couldn’t live through what you went through_ , one wrote.

_So scared I can’t sleep at night_ , said another.

_Thinking about killing myself_ , wrote a third.

A few times, he sat down to try to write back to them—they still weren’t allowed send any mail out, but surely that wouldn’t last forever, especially if they accepted any of the many offers of asylum—but each time he wrote nothing more than, _Dear Annie_ , or _Jack_ or _Robin, I know how you…._

And then he stopped. Did he know how they felt? Not really. When he had been their age, he had heard rumors about G-TAC, whispered horror stories, but he didn’t _know_. And he had also had a plan to evade them, and a fund of adolescent self-confidence that had left him more-or-less convinced his plan couldn’t _really_ fail. He couldn’t imagine what it was like for kids being identified as Guides this year.

He also had no decent advice to offer. The particular loophole that he had used to escape the country had surely been closed by now. Annie, and Jack, and Robin, and all the rest of them might be able to be all right if they kept their heads down and didn’t make trouble—but he couldn’t recommend that. 

Hearing a ruckus outside, Blair tossed the letter he was reading back into the bag and went outside to see what was up. The gates were open, and a Jeep and a large truck were coming in.

Blair’s stomach sank when he saw US Army uniforms on the men in the Jeep. He hurried over to Jim, who was standing with Kas and Angel near the medical building. 

“Jim, what’s going on?” 

“I don’t know,” Jim answered. 

The Jeep parked near them, and the officer riding shotgun got out. After a round of salutes, “Major Ellison, Captain Temas. Can we talk inside?”

After a moment Jim said, “All right.” Kas followed them inside, even though the new guy hadn’t said anything about him, so Blair did too.

Once inside, he studied the new army guy. His name badge said HILYARD, and by comparing the insignia on his uniform with Jim’s, Kas’s, and Angel’s, he concluded that Hilyard was a Captain. More interestingly, Blair didn’t see the SRB or G-TAC insignia. 

“Major Ellison, I’ll be assuming command of this installation effective immediately. You are relieved. Captain, Major, effective 1200 hours tomorrow, you are de-activated from the United States Army.”

Blair didn’t know whether this was good news or not, and apparently, none of the others did either. “What about Kas?” Angel asked.

“Yes, your Guides are de-activated too, of course,” Hilyard said. “Before your deactivation, you’ll be debriefed on the situation here, and I’d also like you to introduce myself and my team to the indigenous leaders.”

“Then what?”

“Then you’ll be provided transportation to Lima, which has an international airport and a number of embassies and consulates. As per Army policy, travel back to the US via commercial carrier will be available at our expense.”

“What’s the catch?”

Hilyard smiled slightly. “We’ll be setting up camp outside, so you can maintain use of your offices and quarters until transport off the base is arranged.”

After another round of salutes, he left.

“Is that…good?” Blair asked. 

“I can’t see how it’s not,” Jim answered. “The Army’s washing its hands of us and giving us an escape route.”

“Yeah, why are they doing that?” Angel asked.

“Probably because having the Army involved in screwing us over is hurting Sentinel recruitment,” Kas answered. 

“How does that matter? They still have the draft,” Blair pointed out.

“Because of the way they run the draft,” Kas explained. “Each branch gets an even split of the drafted Sentinels, _plus_ however many they can convince to sign before their numbers come up. Those count as volunteers and don’t count against the branch’s draft share. For Guides, they just get as many as they got Sentinels the previous year, so there’s no point to recruiting us, but Sentinels basically pay off twice.”

Jim nodded. “All of the branches have the same policy, where they can reactivate Sentinels at any time, but you know how people are.”

“So they’re trying to save face by backing away as fast as possible,” Blair summarized. “Makes sense.”

“That, and that guy was JAG—Army lawyers,” Angel said. “There are probably all kinds of reasons what the Army did was legally questionable. He’s probably here to deal with the Cyclops situation, but the faster he gets rid of us, the less chance any shit will stick to him.”

They spent the next day or so packing up and saying their goodbyes. Jim had a number of meetings with Hilyard and the rest of his team, but they didn’t seem to notice or care whether Blair was in the room or not, so for the most part, he wasn’t. The Army lawyers had even arranged for an official Quechua translator, so they didn’t need him to start negotiations with the Quechua, either.

He did have to translate when they met with Saywa and Chaska to officially decline the offer to join the Chopec. Blair still wasn’t sure which country he wanted to move to, but he was definitely going to pick somewhere with libraries. Fortunately, the Chopec were very understanding about it.

With some reluctance, Blair decided that taking Larry wherever they were going would not be in anyone’s best interest, even leaving aside the massive logistical difficulties. Tamaya was glad to keep him. 

Angel, reminded by this exchange about his pet llama, who he had apparently named “Carlos” sometime in the time since he had last seen or mentioned him, did not feel the same way, and immediately began negotiating with the villagers to locate someone who had a truck and could take the llama to Lima.

At noon on the dot, when they were officially free of the US Army, they held a press conference. Blair had planned to speak, but at the last minute, facing the crowd of men and women slavering to question him about his torture experience, he held out his notes and said, “Somebody else do it.”

Angel took over, apparently quite happily. “Well, first off, we want to thank everyone for their expressions of support,” he began, summarizing quite loosely from Blair’s prepared speech, and ended, “We’ll be spending some time in Lima recovering from the ordeal and considering our options.”

Even though Blair had written _NO QUESTIONS!_ At the bottom of his notes, Angel seemed prepared to entertain some, until Kas dragged him away. 

#

“Oh, now, this is nice,” Blair said, coming out of the shower with a towel around his hips and sprawling on the king-sized bed. After about ten hours of travel by Jeep, helicopter, and then a truly terrifying taxi, they had checked into the Hilton and ordered room service. 

“How’s the water pressure?” Jim asked, heading toward the bathroom to take his own shower.

“Great.”

Jim went into the bathroom, then opened the door and stuck his head out. “Don’t answer the door. If the food comes while I’m in here, I’ll get it.”

Blair resisted the temptation to roll his eyes. Jim had good reason to be paranoid, now that they were back in civilization. “Okay.”

Rolling over, he got the remote off the nightstand and flicked on the TV. He found an international news station, but right after the stock market report, they started showing the press conference. Blair quickly changed the channel. 

Another news program was also covering him, and the chat show he found was doing a cooking segment, but that could change at any time. Finally, he clicked off the TV and eyed the phone. Well, the Army lawyer _had_ said that their whereabouts were no longer classified. Deciding that Simon was more likely to be in his office at this time of day than Dr. Stoddard, he picked up and dialed the Cascade Police Department. After being put on hold a few times, he was finally put through to the Captain. “Hi, Simon, it’s Blair.”

Simon swore. “I saw on the news—What are they trying to pull now? Are you okay? Where’s Jim?”

“It’s okay,” Blair said quickly, making a mental note to start every conversation he had for the next few days with reassurances that he was perfectly safe. “Everything’s fine. We’re at a hotel in Lima. Jim’s in the shower.”

“Oh,” Simon said, with a sigh of relief. “Good. I thought—well, never mind. I saw the press conference, but when you didn’t say anything, I thought something might be fishy about it.”

“I was going to talk, but I was too nervous,” Blair admitted. 

“So what did the Army send you down there for? Was there really a classified mission?”

“I don’t know if we’re allowed to talk about that yet,” Blair answered. He’d have to ask Jim. Probably better to toe the line until they were settled in some other country. “But we’re fine.”

“And when G-TAC had you…”

“After Jim and the others got there, they didn’t do anything other than detain us,” Blair answered, skipping over the subject of what had happened before that. “The Army came and got us that afternoon, and they just detained us some more, until they sent us to Peru.”

“That’s a relief. We’ve all been worried about you.”

“You can tell everybody we’re fine,” Blair offered. “We got everybody’s letters, but we haven’t had a chance to write back yet.” Jim was coming out of the bathroom, and looked inquiringly at Blair. “ _Simon_ ,” he mouthed. Jim held out his hand for the phone; Blair held up one finger. “Jim wants to talk to you. I wanted to ask you a favor, though, first.”

“Shoot.”

“Do you know how to reach Naomi? I gathered you guys met, so…”

“She’s probably still over at G-TAC; there’s a rally going on. There should be some uniforms doing security; I can have somebody get a message to her.”

“Great, thanks.” Blair gave him the hotel’s number and handed the phone to Jim. 

It was kind of funny, watching Jim almost come to attention as he talked to his Captain on the phone. “Sir? Oh, he did.” Jim glanced over at him, puzzled. “I see. I…don’t know. We…have a lot of options. No, probably not.”

Oh. He was telling Simon they weren’t coming back. Blair hadn’t really thought about how taking any of their many options meant that they wouldn’t see their friends in Cascade again. And he wasn’t stupid; he knew that what Jim really wanted was to go back to Cascade, even though Jim would rather be eviscerated than say so, especially with the way Angel was carrying on about wanting to go home. Sentinels got attached to places—well, everyone did, but Sentinels more than most. Jim had lived in Cascade all of his life, except for his military service. He was comfortable there, felt a duty to protect the people there. Going somewhere else had to feel like a betrayal.

He’d feel better once they were settled somewhere else, once he was a cop again. Would he be a cop again? That was something to look into before they made their decision—Jim wouldn’t be happy anywhere he couldn’t do his job.

Their meal came shortly after Jim got off the phone. Jim had retreated firmly into white-bread-and-mayonnaise territory, ordering plain grilled chicken with a baked potato. Blair had the paella, which made a nice change—seafood had been one thing Angel hadn’t been able to get his hands on in the village. “Wonder what Kas and Angel are up to,” Blair said as they ate. The four of them usually had meals together, even if they went to the cafeteria, so it was a little strange eating without them.

“No you don’t,” Jim said, shooting a pointed glare at the wall they shared with Kas and Angel’s room.

“Oh. Sex?”

“Uh-huh.”

It wasn’t a bad idea, but Blair remembered that he was waiting for a call from his mother, and refrained. He was right to do so, too, because once they’d finished eating and Jim had found a soccer game on TV, the phone rang.

“Telephone call for Blair Sandburg from Naomi Sandburg,” one of the hotel staff said. “Do you wish to take the call?”

“Yeah. Please. Thanks. Gracias.” The call was put through, and Blair said quickly, “Hi, Naomi, I’m fine.”

“Blair, baby, are you really? Is that man there?”

“What man?” He thought a moment. “Jim? Of course he’s here. I guess you know the Army let us go, and they’re not going to try to stop us from going to another country. We’re just trying to figure out where we want to go.” Maybe if he focused on their future plans, Naomi wouldn’t bring up anything she had read about in that email.

“Right—you still have to stay with him.”

“Of course I do; we’re Bonded.”

“Are you sure there isn’t some way you can undo it? The whole world is watching right now, you know—this is a tremendous opportunity.”

“There isn’t any way to break a Bond unless one of us dies. Anyway, I don’t want to.” He glanced over at Jim, who seemed to be trying very hard not to listen in. “I like him.”

“He got you drafted into the Army!”

“That wasn’t exactly his fault. And technically I was a civilian contractor. An involuntary civilian contractor. They didn’t cut my hair,” he added, thinking that was a detail that would reassure Naomi. “Or give me a gun.”

“Semantics.”

“Anyway, it only happened because he was caught breaking into G-TAC to get me out. He was all set to become an international fugitive; it just didn’t work out.”

“Couldn’t you have escaped once you got to Peru?”

“Well, yeah,” Blair admitted. “But there are four of us, remember, and nobody else was too keen on becoming an international fugitive if there was a chance we could avoid it.”

“So you were _outvoted_?”

“No, we consensed on it,” Blair said, which was more-or-less true even though the consensus process had some significant differences from the ones used in the communes of his childhood. “I wasn’t committed to the international fugitive plan; it didn’t go that well when I was one before. Anyway, things have turned out pretty well.” Looking for a quick change of subject, he said, “Simon said you were doing a demo today? Tell me about it.”

That kept Naomi talking for a while. Apparently a lot of her radical friends had turned up over the last few weeks—they had what sounded like a real tent city set up across from G-TAC, something the papers hadn’t mentioned. And Naomi, being the actual mother of the person they were protesting about, had been the center of attention, something that hadn’t bothered her a bit. Blair was able to keep the conversation going with only an occasional question about someone they both knew. 

Finally, after listening to a low-quality recording of the protesters singing “We Shall Overcome,” complete with the new verse that had been written about him, Blair said he was tired and began winding the call down. After replacing the phone on the cradle, he flopped down on his back on the bed with a sigh.

“Okay, Chief?”

“Yeah. Just, you know. Naomi. You?” He knew that Jim must have heard what Naomi said about him.

“I’m fine.”

“You sure?” He didn’t really _sound_ fine.

“Yeah, Chief. Don’t worry about it.” Jim turned back pointedly to the TV.

 

#

Angel had suggested the Hilton for the quality mattresses and endless hot water, but Jim had agreed because he thought the pricy hotel would help ensure Blair’s safety and privacy, which turned out to be correct. The concierge was constantly turning away reporters and sightseers, but the only one that got far enough for Jim to send packing personally was a Hispanic-American woman reporter who disguised herself as a maid. She’d even brought her own vacuum cleaner, which Jim had to admit showed dedication.

Blair was reluctant to run the gauntlet of press even to visit the embassies of any of the countries that they were considering, but most of them were willing to send representatives to the hotel—Jim wasn’t sure why; it wasn’t like one cop-Sentinel and anthropologist-Guide were such a prize that the entire world should be fighting over them—so they had the hotel set them up with a meeting room and entertained distinguished guests for most of two days. Angel and Kas sat in on most of the meetings—they had agreed to hold off on announcing that they planned on going back to the US until Jim and Blair had made a decision. 

Jim had lost track of who they were expecting when two Anglo men in suits came in, but their accents immediately put him on alert as they said, “Good afternoon, Dr. Temas, Lieutenant Temas, Detective Ellison, Mr. Sandburg.”

Americans. What in hell did they want?

“I’m Darren Wallace,” the first man said. “I work for Harvey Nelson, the president’s Chief of Staff.”

Blair, who was looking pretty worn out by now, sat up a little and said, “Sorry, the president of what?”

“The United States,” Wallace said, with a hint of condescension.

“I haven’t been in a position to pay much attention to politics lately,” Blair said. 

Wallace looked away. “Right.”

The other man jumped in, “And I’m Sam Fisher. I know we’re probably not your favorite people right now, but I hope you’ll hear us out. The president--”

“Of the United States,” Blair said.

“Right, him. He’s putting together an advisory council on federal Sentinel-Guide policy.”

“We’ve heard,” Angel told him.

“And he’d like to personally invite you to be on it. The four of you, I mean.”

Huh.

Before Jim could come up with a response, Angel said, “How nice. Is this a publicity stunt, or will this task force have any real power?”

Wallace said, “The aim is that the council will create new internal policy for G-TAC and the SRB, as well as the various branches of the military and will propose necessary supporting legislation for passage through Congress. The council would be working directly with the White House on the internal policy matters that are under the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief.”

“In other words, it has about as much real power as an unelected body can have,” Fisher added. 

“The effect the council can have on legislation will be indirect, but the President is prepared to expend considerable political capital on this issue,” Wallace finished. “Also, the President wanted us to make clear that repealing the Sentinel-Guide draft entirely is not on the table, but he does aim for broad, sweeping reform.”

After exchanging significant glances with Angel, Kas spoke up. “Would we have to move back to DC?”

“It wouldn’t be necessary, no. We could arrange to have you flown in for meetings—or, if the majority of the advisory council is located elsewhere—say, Cascade—the rest of the members could be brought there,” Wallace explained.

“But you would have to be residents of the United States,” Fisher added.

Jim looked at Blair, waiting to see how he was going to respond to this offer. Kas and Angel waited, too. “We’ll certainly consider it,” Blair finally said. “We’ll get back to you.”

“Of course. We have some materials for you to look over—the council’s mission and scope, profiles of some of the other members we’re considering, that sort of thing.” Wallace gestured to Fisher, who handed them each a folder with the Seal of the President on it. “And this is my direct number—please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any other questions.” He dealt around business cards, only hesitating for a second before handing some to Blair and Kas. 

After the two men left, Angel laughed nervously. “Fuck. That was…interesting.”

“Yeah,” Blair said, sounding distant.

“What do you think?” Kas said. “I think we should do it—us two, I mean. Since we’re going back anyway.”

Angel nodded. “Yeah. Me too.” Looking at Blair, he added, “And if you guys end up somewhere else, we can keep you in the loop on it if you want. Pass along your ideas.”

“Yeah, that…that sounds good,” Blair said.

No one asked Jim what he wanted to do, which was probably for the best since in Jim’s mind, when the leader of the free world asked you to do something, you did it. He had to admit, it was only mildly surprising that Blair didn’t feel the same way. 

#

Late that night, Blair sat at the desk in their hotel room with the President’s glossy folder at one hand, and the pile of letters he hadn’t known how to answer at the other. In a way, he thought, he had known what he had to do from the moment the President’s offer came out of that weasel-faced guy’s mouth. He had fought it like hell because he didn’t _like_ it, but it wasn’t like there was any real doubt.

Going back to the States, member of a hand-picked presidential advisory council or not, would mean submitting to the hundreds of small humiliations that made up a Guide’s life in the United States. Needing to have Jim sign a permission slip for him to go to school. Not being allowed to have a bank account, or own any substantial property. Having anything he earned legally belong to Jim. Everyone from waiters in restaurants on up looking past him for Jim’s nod of approval to any decision he voiced. How could he accept that, and not _be_ humiliated?

And if he did serve on that council… _he_ knew he had qualifications more substantial than being a victim of torture, but nobody else did, and he’d have to accept that playing Public Symbolic Victim was part of the job. He wouldn’t be able to hide from questions about the torture, wouldn’t have the option of just turning off the TV and looking away when somebody insisted on talking about it. He’d have to look people in the eye and know that they were imagining him naked, bloody, and screaming.

It wouldn’t be an easy job, either. He’d read the profiles of his fellow potential council members, and he wasn’t going to be preaching to the choir. There would be people on it who would drag out every detail of his suffering, and if he lost his composure say, “See? This is why Guides are too emotionally unstable to be treated like real adults.”

And Naomi would not be pleased. She had always believed that those who set out to change the system from within inevitably ended up corrupted, collaborators. If he could even convince her that this was his own choice, and not something Jim had in some Svengali-like way forced him into, she would see it as a betrayal. 

But then, there were the letters. He couldn’t look at them and say, “Sorry, I had a chance to do something that might make things better for you, but I chickened out. Good luck with that, though.” He also thought of Tamaya, who would be leaving her family to be Guide to a Sentinel she didn’t know, not because anybody would force her to do it, but because it was her duty.

When Jim rolled over in bed and said, “Christ, Sandburg, are you still up?” Blair answered,

“I think we have to talk.”

Jim sat up and clicked on the light. “I know you don’t want to go back to the States, Chief. It’s okay.”

“That’s the thing. I think maybe I do.” Blair circled around the bed and climbed in next to Jim, who automatically held out his arm to tuck Blair in against his side. “I mean, I don’t want to, but I think we should.”

Jim went stiff. “Why? If it’s for me—I mean, I hate to leave Cascade, but all that really matters is that you’re okay. That’s the most important thing.”

“Except it’s kind of not. And it’s not you. I mean, sure, I want you to be happy and everything,” not to the extent that he was willing to give up everything for it, as Jim apparently was, or at least _said_ he was, and that might be a problem for later, “but this advisory council thing. It’s…important.”

Jim settled down a little bit. Apparently, Blair making a big sacrifice for an abstract idea was more acceptable than making one for him. Go figure. “It might not work. I mean, it’s the government. Sure, right now the president is making this a priority, but when the fuss dies down….”

“When the fuss dies down, I bet I can stir it up again. I’m good at that,” Blair pointed out. 

“If you do manage to accomplish anything, G-TAC is going to be pretty hacked off at you. I don’t know if I’ll be able to protect you.”

“Yeah, and that’s scary as hell,” Blair admitted. “But I’ve had them pissed off at me before, and for a lot less of a reason.” It was almost like all of his righteous but meaningless rebellion up until now had been nothing but preparation for _this_. If he could take what had driven him to stay on his feet and struggling when G-TAC tried to tear him down, and channel it toward a real purpose—well, he didn’t know what might happen, but he had a feeling G-TAC had more to fear than he did. “You remember, back when we first got together, how I told you about what Guides do in traditional cultures?”

“Yeah, sure. Shamans, healers, medicine men.”

“Moral and spiritual leaders of the tribe,” Blair said. “I don’t think the President knows it, but he’s giving me and Kas the chance to do the kind of thing that Guides are really _for_. And you know, it wasn’t ever that I didn’t want to be a Guide. It was that I didn’t want to be Western culture’s idea of a Guide. And well—here’s my chance. I can’t turn it down just because it’s going to be hard.”

Jim’s arm tightened around him. “It is going to be hard. Kas and Angel can probably blend a little more. You’re…that’s not you. The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down.”

“Don’t I know it. But you’re forgetting where I grew up. I was hearing about the heroes of the civil rights movement since I was in Pampers. When all the nails stand up, eventually the hammer breaks.” 

“Well,” Jim said, “if you’re sure. It’s your decision.”

Blair shook his head. “Uh-uh. It’s _our_ decision. If we do this, we’re going to have to do it together.”

“You didn’t have a choice about Bonding with me--” Jim began.

“And you didn’t either, about Bonding with _me_ ,” Blair reminded him. “We can’t plan our whole lives around you atoning, or whatever, for something that wasn’t your fault in the first place. It can’t be you humoring me because you feel bad about what G-TAC did to me. That’s not any better than me following you around because you’re the Sentinel, really. We have to be real partners.”

Jim sighed. “I don’t know what the hell I want, Chief. I mean, I want you to be safe. But I’m hearing that’s not what you want.”

“It’s a really nice…impulse,” Blair said carefully. “But I don’t think I was put on this Earth to be safe, any more than you were. You didn’t join the Army and become a police officer because you thought it would be safe.”

“No,” Jim said slowly. “I did it because it was my duty.”

“Exactly.” Blair slid out of bed and padded over to the desk, returning with the pile of his mail. “Look at some of these. This—these people are some of our tribe. These are the people we’re supposed to be protecting.”

 

#

The next day, Blair arranged a press conference in the hotel’s meeting room. There was no hiding behind Angel now. Clutching his notes with both hands and trying not to think about how badly he wanted to throw up, he stepped up to the microphone and then winced as cameras flashed. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m Blair Sandburg. Thank you for coming here today and for all the attention you’ve helped bring to the abuse of Guides in the United States.” He had hesitated over those words for a long time, wanting to say something vague like, “the situation” or “what’s happening,” but finally had made himself face up and call it what it was. “I’d also like to thank everyone who has written to us, because some of you have helped me make the decision that I’m here to tell you about today.”

“What decision is that, Mr. Sandburg?” one of the reporters at the back called.

“I’m getting to it,” Blair answered, and everybody laughed. “A few minutes ago, I spoke to the President of the United States, to let him know that I’ve decided to accept his invitation to serve on the Presidential Advisory Council on—what did he decide we were calling it?” Blair asked the others, who were standing off to the side. That got another laugh.

“Sentinel-Guide Policy,” Kas supplied. 

“Right. The name might change again, but that’s what it is today, anyway.” He explained what the task force would do, reading some of the details from his shiny presidential folder, and finished, “So, while we’re very grateful and touched by the welcome that has been offered by the governments of other countries, we—all four of us—will be returning to the US.” Another round of flashes, and he took a deep breath. “Questions?”

The first barrage of questions were yelled; Blair held up his hands until the press fell quiet. “One at a time, please.” He pointed to a reporter from one of the more highbrow papers, one he thought might lead with something other than the torture question. “You?”

“Mr. Sandburg, can you share why you have made this decision?”

“Yeah. I think I can best answer that by sharing some of the mail that I’ve been getting.” He was prepared for this one; from the back of his shiny folder with the Seal of the President on it, he took a few pieces of notebook paper. “I got this from a girl named Annie. She’s sixteen and she was identified as a Guide when she was tested at school this year….”

 

Epilogue

 

“Sir, the pilot is beginning his approach, and the fasten seatbelt light is on,” Jim heard a female voice say. He cracked open one eyelid—yep, Angel and Kas were at it again, Angel straddling Kas’s lap in a manner that was definitely not befitting an officer. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were travelling in civvies, like Jim was, but both of them were in their Class A’s. 

Apparently, Angel’s dislike of all things military did not extend to the sight of his Guide in dress uniform. Hours ago, when they had first boarded the plane, Blair had asked Angel about the uniform and been told, “Kas looks really hot in his, and he wouldn’t wear it unless I wore mine.”

Kas had added, “Being out of the Army again reactivated his uniform fetish. Go figure.” 

The uniforms also made it very obvious who they were, and were probably responsible for the free upgrade to first class that they had been given. Either that or the flight attendant assigned to First shared Angel’s fetish; from the pheromones coming off of her, she was clearly enjoying the free show.

Once Angel dismounted and fastened his seatbelt, grumbling about it in Spanish, the plane started its descent and Blair leaned over Jim to look out the window at Cascade. He was putting out some pheromones of his own, Jim was pleased to notice. 

“It’s still there,” Jim said. 

“I didn’t think we’d see it again,” Blair admitted. “Is that the University, over there?” he asked, pointing.

Jim took a look. “Yep. I can’t see our building from here; it’s over on the other side.”

They were first off the plane when it landed, with Angel and Kas slightly behind because they couldn’t make it down the jetway without stopping to grope each other several times.

“Reporters?” Blair asked as they entered the airport.

Jim listened. “Yeah. Just outside security. We could see if there’s a back way,” he suggested.

Blair looked tempted, but said, “We can’t hide from them forever. Anyway, if we’re lucky Kas and Angel will provide a distraction.”

Kas and Angel had checked baggage to deal with, not to mention llama arrangements to make, so they said their goodbyes in the security area, Kas and Blair agreeing to call about getting together in a couple of days. 

The press crowd was smaller now, and mostly local. Jim hoped that meant that something else had caught their attention. Blair faced up to the first microphone that was shoved in his face and said, “Thanks. We’ve had a long day, and we’re headed home to relax. Yes, we’re happy to be home. There’s nothing new to tell you about since the press conference the other day—the Advisory Council hasn’t met yet; I don’t think the rest of the Council has even been selected. We’ll let you know as soon as there’s news.”

After that, they no-commented their way out of the building and into a cab. 

When the cab pulled up in front of their building, Jim was surprised to see his truck sitting there. Hadn’t they left it in the G-TAC parking lot? They made their way upstairs—the elevator was out, again, or still—and into the loft. The slight smell of cigar smoke, and the absence of the reek of rotting garbage, explained all. “Simon was here.”

Blair paused on the way to his room. “That’s not bad, is it?”

“No,” Jim said. “He cleaned up a little.” He opened the refrigerator experimentally—yup, it was empty of months-old leftovers and rancid milk, and stocked with a couple days’ worth of fresh groceries, plus some beer that Jim was pretty sure hadn’t been in there when they left. He took one out and cracked it open. “Steak-steak or swordfish steak for dinner?” he asked Blair, when his Guide came out of his room. 

“Swordfish, I think,” Blair said, sidling up to him and wrapping his arms around him. “But I’m not hungry yet, are you?”

“No,” Jim agreed, shifting his beer to his other hand and sliding his free one down to cup Blair’s ass. “Not if you have other plans.”

Blair shifted out of his arms and took Jim’s beer. “Yeah, I think I want to--” He took a long swallow; Jim watched, mesmerized by the muscles of his throat. “Take a shower.” 

“Oh.”

“Coming?” he asked brightly, handing the beer bottle back.

Jim didn’t have to be asked twice. 

“You are happy to be home,” he said appreciatively as Blair wriggled out of his jeans and boxers. 

“Oh, yeah. You know how I love this apartment.” He leaned in for a kiss that tasted of beer and airplane lasagna, then got busy on Jim’s shirt buttons. 

Shoving off his own khakis, Jim said, “I love—the apartment, too.”

“Uh-huh,” Blair said, giving his cock an affectionate tug. “Uh, you know we’re not really talking about the apartment, right?”

“Yeah, Chief, I know.”

“Just checking.”

Blair proved disappointingly focused on actually getting clean as they showered, although not above copping the occasional feel. When that mission was accomplished, however, he took Jim by the hand, still naked, and dragged him upstairs to the bedroom. Once they were there, he pushed Jim down onto his back on the bed and began kissing him with intent. 

When Blair started making his way southward, Jim pulled himself together enough to say, “Hey.”

Blair glanced up from his cock. “What?”

“I wanna do you,” he said, gesturing to indicate that he wanted to do what Blair was doing.

“Oh,” Blair said. After thinking for a moment, he grinned. “Okay.”

Instead of switching places, though, he pivoted around, leaving his head where it was but bringing his lower body up alongside Jim’s. 

Jim was initially dubious. His last attempt at sixty-nine had resulted in a stiff neck and a very unsatisfied girlfriend. As it turned out, however, most of the height difference between him and Blair was in the legs. Their torsos were more evenly matched, and the geometry worked out. As he began to tease Blair’s cock, he realized that Blair was copying what he did. An experimental lick and swirl with his tongue confirmed it, when Blair did the same a second later. Jim paused, waiting to see what Blair would do if he did nothing. He felt Blair smiling around his cock, then Blair tried some experimental strokes of his own, which Jim matched.

They traded back and forth between leading and following for a while, until Blair decided they’d had enough and began sucking in earnest. Jim teetered on the edge of zoning on the sensation of Blair’s mouth on his cock, Blair’s cock in his mouth. They came within seconds of each other, and Blair rested his head on Jim’s stomach for a moment before coming up to rest on the pillow beside him. 

“That was a hell of a welcome home,” Blair said, hooking a blanket with one foot and tugging it up over them both.

“Welcome home,” Jim agreed sleepily.

END

**Author's Note:**

> Want more Dreaded Bonding AU? The crossover stories "Thomas and the Society of Sentinels" (Downton Abbey) and "What You Don't Know (Can Hurt a Lot)" (Avengers cinematic universe) are available on this archive. 
> 
> Much more, including Kas and Angel's origin story is available on my LJ; see the master post here: http://alex51324.livejournal.com/238549.html

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Too Heavy For Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3930790) by [daniomalley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/daniomalley/pseuds/daniomalley)




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